Updated: 21:55
BOSTON POLICE HAVE killed one of the men suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon bomb attacks, while the other suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, remains at large and is “armed and dangerous”.
Police say the two men, believed to be brothers from Chechnya but who have been living in the US, were the perpetrators behind the bombs that killed three people and injured about 180 at the Boston Marathon on Monday.
One police officer was shot dead and another wounded in a violent shootout led by the two men on Thursday night that has left much of the Boston region – an area with roughly 900,000 people – in lockdown all day.
Governor Deval Patrick has extended a safety warning from the town of Watertown and the surrounding areas to the entire city of Boston, telling residents to stay indoors and answer only to law enforcement officers with proper IDs. Police have shut down public transport and have told businesses to remain closed.
Investigators are making door-to-door inquiries and are following a number of leads in the search for the missing 19-year-old ‘second suspect’, who is feared to be strapped with explosives.
The MIT police officer who was killed during a confrontation with the two Boston Marathon bombing suspects has been named as 26-year-old Sean Collier. Another officer, who was also involved in an altercation with the duo, is in a critical condition in hospital, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis has said.
The 26-year-old bomber died after suffering multiple gunshot wounds and critical injuries from explosives, a doctor at Beth Israel Hospital said.
The surviving fugitive was “armed and dangerous,” Davis said. “We believe this to be a terrorist, we believe this to be a man who has come here to kill people,” the city police chief told reporters.
The suspects first tried to rob a convenience store in Cambridge, across the river from Boston. It is then believed they made their way to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where the shootings and explosions began and where one campus police officer was shot several times and died.
The pair then hijacked a Mercedes car and held up the driver at gunpoint. The driver was freed and they took the car to Watertown, which was sealed off by more than 9,000 police armed with shotguns, assault rifles and other weapons.
During the police pursuit of the car there was an “exchange of gunfire” and ‘suspect one’ was shot and later died of his wounds.
The second ‘white hat’ bombing suspect made off on foot and heavily armed police have the area on lock-down in pursuit of the man.
The explosions and gunfire were heard in the Watertown district north of the university. “There were blasts, it could have been grenades,” local resident Adam Brown said.
The NBC-WJAR channel later showed film of a man lying on the ground in a street in the town and surrounded by police.
MIT students were kept in a lockdown for three hours after the shooting on campus. Police with rifles flooded the streets, and search helicopters patrolled the skies.
MIT, one of the world’s top universities, is in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston where the double bomb attack was staged on Monday.
Hours before the manhunt, the FBI released pictures and video of the two suspects, appealing for help to identify the pair who were carrying large backpacks.
Both appeared to be young men, one dressed in a white baseball cap and the other in a black cap. The FBI gave no details of their identities or origin, naming them only as ‘suspect one’ and ‘suspect two’.
Two bombs were placed around the marathon finish line on Monday, spraying nails, ball bearings and other metal fragments into massed spectators, many of whom suffered horrific injuries.
The men are seen in the video walking calmly, one a few paces behind the other, weaving between crowds on Boston’s Boylston Street where the race finished.
President Barack Obama vowed to the people of Boston yesterday that the “evil” bombers would be brought to justice.
- Additional reporting AFP
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