After building the bombs faster than expected, the suspects reportedly drove around Boston and Cambridge looking for other targets.
The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings reportedly told the F.B.I. that he and his brother considered suicide attacks and striking on the Fourth of July as they planned an assault, the New York Times and Boston Globe reported Thursday night.
But the suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told investigators that he and his brother, Tamerlan, who was killed in a shootout with the police in Watertown, ultimately decided to use homemade explosive devices.
"The brothers finished building the bombs in Tamerlan’s apartment in Cambridge, Mass., faster than they had anticipated, and so decided to accelerate their attack to the Boston Marathon on April 15, Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts, according to the account that Dzhokhar provided to authorities. They picked the finish line of the marathon after driving around the Boston area looking for alternative sites, according to this account," the Times reported.
After building the bombs faster than anticipated, they drove around Boston and Cambridge sometime before Patriots Day, casing police stations, with an alternative plan to launch an attack on law enforcement officers, one of the officials told the Boston Globe.
"The fresh details from the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev interrogation with the FBI further enhances the notion of an oddly haphazard plot, one that ultimately focused on the homestretch and finish line of the Boston Marathon, the city’s most iconic sporting event," the Globe reported.
Some law enforcement officials expressed skepticism about Tsarnaev’s account, saying that the complexity of the bombs made it unlikely that the brothers could have completed them as fast as he claimed.
“Maybe we will never know,” one of the officials, who has been briefed on the interrogation, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying. “This is the story that he is telling us.”
Meanwhile, Boston radio station WBZ reported that the bombings are going to affect the way the city plans security for this year's Fourth of July festivities.
“We’re heading to New York City to learn about the Times Square plan that they’ve put in place for New Year’s,” said Police Superintendent Paul Fitzgerald told the radio station. “Because clearly, that’s a very high risk event that they run there, but they’re so helpful to us we’re gonna go down and see how they run that event.”