WASHINGTON, April 30 (RIA Novosti) – Russia has been “very cooperative” in helping the United States investigate the Boston Marathon bombings and lingering suspicions between Washington and Moscow dating back to the Cold War are improving, US President Barack Obama said Tuesday.
“The Russians have been very cooperative with us since the Boston bombing,” Obama said at a White House news conference, responding to a question on whether US investigators have received adequate information from Moscow on the bombing suspects who hail from Russia and the former Soviet Union.
“Obviously old habits die hard. There’s still suspicions sometimes between our intelligence and law enforcement agencies that date back 10, 20, 30 years,” Obama admitted. “But they’re continually improving.”
Obama has spoken by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin twice in the past 12 days and he said Tuesday of the Russian president: “He’s committed to working with me” on the Boston bombing investigation in particular and on counterterrorism issues in general.
Russia’s FSB security agency asked US agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2011 to investigate one of the Boston suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, warning that Moscow feared he had turned to “radical Islam” and could be a threat.
Some US lawmakers have said Russia should have supplied more information when an initial US investigation of Tsarnaev did not turn up evidence that he was a terror threat.