THE GUARDIAN: Police: 'courageous and compassionate individual came forward to provide assistance to properly bury the deceased'
"As a result of our public appeal for help, a courageous and compassionate individual came forward to provide the assistance needed to properly bury the deceased," Worcester police said in a statement.
Tsarnaev's body had been at the Graham Putnam & Mahoney Funeral Parlors. Its director, Peter Stefan, had said that he could not find a community willing to take the body, including Cambridge, where the family had lived for a decade. Tsarnaev's uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, had custody of the body.
Katherine Russell, Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wife, had wanted his body turned over to his side of the family, which claimed it. Nineteen days after his death, cemeteries were still refusing to take his remains and government officials deflected questions about where he could be buried. On Wednesday, police in Worcester pleaded for a resolution, saying they were spending tens of thousands of dollars to protect the funeral home where the body was being kept, amid protests.
An expert in US burial law said the resistance to Tsarnaev's burial was unprecedented in a country that has always found a way to put to rest its notorious killers, from Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated president John F Kennedy in 1963, to Adam Lanza, who shot dead 20 children and six adults at a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school last year. In Russia, officials would not comment after Tsarnaev's mother said authorities would not allow her son's body into the country, so she could bury him in her native Dagestan. » | Associated Press in Boston | Thursday, May 09, 2013
