BOSTON — Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told his mother in an email days after the explosions that he expected to die, federal prosecutors said in court filings.
Tsarnaev wrote the email in the hours before the slaying of Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier and the police shootout that took his brother’s life, prosecutors said.
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“If I don’t see you in this life I will see you in the akhira,” prosecutors say he wrote. In Arabic, akhirah refers to the afterlife.
Prosecutors filed the court papers Monday to argue against a motion by Tsarnaev’s lawyers to suppress evidence seized from a Cambridge apartment where Tsarnaev once lived, as well as his University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth dorm room.
“These circumstances leave little doubt that when Tsarnaev left the Norfolk Street apartment on April 18, he did not expect to return alive, and thus abandoned his expectation of privacy in everything left behind,” prosecutors wrote.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office also argued that Tsarnaev had essentially moved out of the apartment and thus had no expectation of privacy. Prosecutors also denied the defense’s contention that the search was overly broad.
Tsarnaev did not pay rent and was not on the lease, prosecutors said, and was instead living in his dorm room full time. Although he kept a few items in the Cambridge apartment, he has not demonstrated a reasonable expectation of privacy, they said.
Prosecutors also defended their searches of a laptop owned by the suspect, because he gave it away to a friend and never expected to see it again.
Tsarnaev, 20, has pleaded not guilty to several federal charges. Prosecutors allege he and his brother planted two pressure cooker bombs near the marathon’s finish line, killing three people and injuring more than 260 others. His brother was killed during the gunbattle with police four days after the marathon bombing.
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