A Kazakh exchange student who was friends with the Boston Marathon bomber was sentenced to 3-1/2 years in U.S. federal prison on Friday for removing a backpack containing fireworks from the suspect’s room during a massive manhunt.
Azamat Tazhayakov was the second of three friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be sentenced for going to Tsarnaev’s dorm room three days after the April 2013 bombing, after the FBI released images of Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, identifying them as suspects.
Tazhayakov had been convicted last year of obstruction of justice. Another friend, Robel Phillipos, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was found guilty of the lesser charge of lying to investigators, is set to be sentenced later on Friday.
The third friend, Dias Kadyrbayev, also of Kazakhstan, was sentenced on Tuesday to six years after pleading guilty to obstructing the investigation into the attack that killed three people and injured 264.
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