Bill Van Auken: The FBI Murder of Ibrahim Todashev:

The Boston Witness Who Knew Too Much? FBI and other law enforcement officials revealed Wednesday that Ibrahim Todashev, the 27 year old Chechen immigrant, who was shot and killed after being interrogated for days about the Boston Marathon bombings, had been unarmed. The killing of Todashev, and the rapid disintegration of the government's official story, that he was shot after lunging after lunging at interrogators with a knife, is an extraordinary event. It casts into further doubt everything that has been said so far about the Boston Marathon bombings. The report that Todashev was unarmed, was followed Thursday by a press conference in Moscow, where the murdered man's father, Abdulbaki Todashev presented a series of photographs of his son's body taken at a Florida morgue, showing that he had been shot six times in the torso, and once in the crown of his head. I would like to say that looking at these photos is like being in a movie, he said. I only saw things like that in movies, shooting a person, and then the kill shot. Six shots in the body, one of them in the head. He added: Maybe my son knew something, some information the police did not want to be made public. Maybe they wanted to silence my son. Todashev, a mixed martial arts fighter, was acquainted with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston bombing suspect killed by police on April 19, as they were both ethnic Chechens and used the same gym when Todashev lived in the Boston area. In breaking the story, the Washington Post reported that An air of mystery has surrounded the FBI shooting since it happened in Orlando, Florida on May 22. This is a gross understatement. The entire affair reeks to high heaven of an extra legal execution and coverup. The admission that the FBI shot to death an unarmed man, led to calls by civil rights groups and Todashev's widow and family for an independent investigation into the killing. The Council on American-Islamic Relations held a press conference in Orlando, calling for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division to launch a probe into how an unarmed man, who had not been charged or convicted of anything was shot seven times, once in the head. Meanwhile, at the press conference in Moscow, Zaurbek Sadakharov of the Moscow Interterritorial Bar Association, stated his belief that the case was one of extrajudicial execution, and urged Todashev's friend, who had taken the morgue photos, to return to Russia. Being a witness in the US is not safe, he said.