Eric Mercado, a former high school classmate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, told CNN that he and his friends remember a conversation in which Tsarnaev said, "When justified, terrorism isn't necessarily a bad thing." The comment was dismissed as outlandish. "No one wants to believe that their friend from high school is a quote-unquote 'terrorist,'" Mercado said.

The bombs, reportedly packed inside pressure cookers, bear striking resemblances to instructions offered by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula's Inspire magazine. One article suggested that pressure cooker bombs should be "placed in crowded areas and left to blow up. More than one of these could be planted to explode at the same time. However, keep in mind that the range of the shrapnel in this operation is short range so the pressurized cooker or pipe should be placed close to the intended targets and should not be concealed from them by barriers such as walls."
[link to www.investigativeproject.org]