Report: wife of Boston bomber converted to Islam over Catholic sex abuse scandal

Details from the Irish Times: 

A search for a religion with ‘more morals’ than the Catholicism she was raised in led Katherine Russell, 24, the widow of Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, to convert to Islam, her husband’s former friend has revealed.

According to the Boston Globe, retiree Donald Larking, 67, commenced an unlikely friendship with Tamerlan in 2011 when the Boston bomber was 25 and his mother Zubeidat Tsarnaev had begun caring for Larking’s quadriplegic wife in their home just west of the city.

‘She wanted a church with more morals,’ Larking told the Globe. ‘She felt that a mosque would be a safer place for her daughter to go to nursery school.’

Larking, who is himself a convert from Catholicism to Islam, met Tsarnaev’s wife when Zubeidat Tsarnaev returned to Russia last year. When Zubediat left the country for good Katherine Tsarnaev reportedly took over the role of carer to Larking’s wife.

Speaking to the Globe, Larking claimed that Tsarnaev admitted she had become disillusioned with the Catholic Church following the series of international sexual abuse scandals that engulfed it in recent decades.

Russell, 24, was described by the Globe as an all-American girl when she began dating Tsarnaev. Soon she converted to Islam, then dropped out of her studies at Sussex University in Boston before graduating to marry the then promising boxer in a ceremony in 2010.

Friends in her hometown of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, told the Daily Mail that the woman they knew ‘was brainwashed by her super-religious husband.’ After meeting Tsarnaev she was ‘not the same person at all,’ they claimed.

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