Slain Boston bomber suspect entombed

Slain Boston Marathon bomber suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev has finally been buried, ending a growing row over what to do with his body, police in the Massachusetts town of Worcester said Thursday. "As a result of our public appeal for help, a courageous and compassionate individual came forward to provide the assistance needed to properly bury the deceased," the police department said on its website. "His body is no longer in the City of Worcester and is now entombed," the statement said. Tsarnaev, 26, died in a gun battle with police three days after the April 15 bombings that killed three people and injured more than 260 at the marathon finish line. He was killed by bullets and blunt trauma, according to the medical report, and was apparently hit by the car driven by his younger brother Dzhokhar, who is being detained in a prison hospital with gunshot wounds. Ever since the bloody denouement of the Boston bomb plot, the body of the once promising amateur boxer had been in limbo at a funeral home. Cemeteries refused to accept him and municipal officials in the Boston area declined to intervene, while protesters besieging the funeral home demanded Tsarnaev's corpse be sent back to his home province of Dagestan in Russia's troubled, mostly Muslim Caucasus region. However, an uncle living in the United States said that Tsarnaev should be laid to rest in what had become his true home in Boston, leading to an increasingly ugly impasse. On Wednesday, Worcester Police Chief Gary Gemme pleaded for a resolution, saying: "We are not barbarians. We bury the dead." But Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said he didn't want Tsarnaev buried there. This was echoed by the city manager in Cambridge, where Tsarnaev had last lived, citing fears of "turmoil, protests and widespread media presence at such an interment." In their statement Thursday, Worcester police did not identify the person who finally solved the standoff and held off from giving the location of the grave. "The chief thanks the community that provided the burial site. There is no further information at this time," the department said. Investigators believe that the Tsarnaev brothers were motivated by radical Islamist ideology when they bombed the marathon. Their family originates from Chechnya, where tens of thousands of civilians have died during Russia's attempt over the last two decades to put down an armed rebellion with carpet bombing and allegedly widespread massacres and use of torture. However, there has been no concrete evidence so far that the brothers acted as part of a wider conspiracy or in concert with militant groups abroad. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, faces life imprisonment or the death penalty if convicted on terrorism charges, including using a weapon of mass destruction.