Zubeidat Tsarnaeva (1968-) was a Russian Avar immigrant to the United States who was the mother of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzokhar Tsarnaev. She was known for her Islamist sympathies, as she quit her job in cosmetics after she was required to serve males, and she claimed that her sons' attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013 was a "play" with paint instead of blood.
Biography[]
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva was born in the Soviet Union to a family of Sunni Muslim Avars, and she married Anzor Tsarnaev. Her older son Tamerlan Tsarnaev was born in the Kalmyk ASSR in 1986, and the family eventually moved to Kyrgyzstan, where her second son Dzokhar Tsarnaev was born in 1993. In 2001, the family moved again to Makhachkala in the Dagestan state of Russia, and the family claimed that they would be persecuted there; in 2003, they finally moved to Massachusetts in the United States. She worked in cosmetics until she quit her job due to being required to serve males as well as females, as interacting with males contradicted her traditional Islamic views. In July 2012, she was arrested for shoplifting $1,600 worth of clothing from a Lord & Taylor store, and she never showed up for a hearing on 25 October 2012. She was believed to have radicalized her sons with her traditional Islamic views, leading to their execution of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. At the time, Zubeidat was back in Dagestan, and she remained in the country rather than return to America. She said that heading to America was a mistake, saying that America took her sons from her, as well as saying that they had been framed for murder while they had really performed a "play" using red paint instead of blood. She gestured wildly in a video while claiming that her sons were innocent, and she decided not to go to America for her son's burial, as she would be arrested on her return.