Thank you, momoe! This

The key back in 2013, I think, is Maret Tsarnaeva’s assertion that the father, Anzor, ‘worked in the enforcement agencies’ in Russian Chechnya. ‘We were,’ she said, ‘lucky to get him out of Kyrgyzstan alive,’ presumably because radical Muslims were trying to track him down and take revenge on him there. She also seems to imply that he was given asylum in the US easily, precisely because he had been an ‘enforcer’ in Grozny against the Muslim fundamentalist rebels, and so there was no doubt that his life was in danger from them.

It is possible that she is saying that Anzor Tsarnaev was a soldier or security policeman for the pro-Russian Chechnyan government of Akhmet Kadyrov, established in 1999 in the course of the Second Chechnya War against the Islamic Peacekeeping Army, which had invaded Daghestan.

is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of when I implied on my own thread that it might be interesting to hear more of what Maret had to say. What's very common in that culture is the whole "just because your paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you" schema. And while the sons may not have directly been privy to all that happened with their family before they were born or of age, it's still damn interesting.  May or may not be part of understanding the current crime, but interesting nonetheless, and, I think, it would dumb of us not to hear out her conspiracy theories, just to better understand a certain mindset.