Responding to a tip from a local resident, police found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, hiding in a boat in a suburban backyard in Watertown, wounded and weary after a gun battle overnight in which his accomplice brother was killed.[break]
"Captured!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody," the Boston police department said on Twitter after Tsarnaev was taken away to applause from relieved residents.
Hundreds of people later descended into the streets of Boston to celebrate, chanting: "USA! USA!" Some climbed onto car roofs while others danced in the streets.
A neighbor alerted police after finding Tsarnaev "covered with blood" in the boat where he had taken refuge, Boston police chief Ed Davis told reporters.
The University of Massachusetts student was surrounded by a small army of police for a final showdown which lasted nearly two hours. Attempts to negotiate with him failed as he was "not communicating," Davis said.
"We exchanged gunfire with the suspect who was inside the boat, and ultimately, the hostage rescue team of the FBI made an entry into the boat and removed the suspect," Davis told a press conference.
Following his capture, Tsarnaev was taken to hospital, where he was in serious condition.
"We will determine what happened. We will investigate any associations that these terrorists may have had. And we´ll continue to do whatever we have to do to keep our people safe," President Barack Obama said after the capture.
The arrest ended a dramatic four days after two bombs exploded at the marathon finish line, killing three people and wounding about 180 in the worst attack on the United States since the September 11, 2001 atrocities.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his 26-year-old brother Tamerlan were named as the main suspects. They were also at the center of a violent spree in which one policeman was killed and a second officer wounded.
The bombings traumatized the city with investigators at first seeming to be struggling to find the attackers.
A major breakthrough came when the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Thursday released video and picture images of the Tsarnaev brothers as they walked in Boylston Street where the attacks took place.
Within hours of that press conference, the brothers embarked on a final rampage through the Boston suburbs.
A police officer was killed in a "vicious assassination," Davis said, and the suspects then carjacked a Mercedes, sparking a high-speed police chase to Watertown.
Police said the two men hurled explosives out of the car window before the elder brother was shot. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died of bullet wounds and injuries from explosives strapped to his body, a hospital doctor said.
Police launched a huge manhunt on Friday with 9,000 police surrounding Watertown and parts of nearby districts hoping to isolate the teenager who was believed wounded in the shootout in which his brother was killed.
Boston ground to a standstill as authorities halted all public transport, ordered schools and universities closed and told people in most of the region to stay in their homes.
The Tsarnaev brothers are ethnic Chechen Muslims who moved to the United States about a decade ago. Their social media pages appeared to express sympathy with the struggle of Chechnya, which has been ravaged by two wars since 1994 between Russia and increasingly Islamist-leaning separatist rebels.
The suspects´ father Anzor Tsarnaev told Russia´s Interfax news agency his sons had been "set up by the secret services because they are practicing Muslims." But an uncle, Ruslan Tsarni said the pair had put "shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity."
"Somebody radicalized them," he said of his nephews. "It´s not my brother."
The FBI acknowledged on Friday that an unnamed foreign government had asked about Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 but they had found no key information.
Obama said the bombing suspects had failed to achieve whatever it was they were seeking.
"They failed because the people of Boston refused to be intimidated," he said. "They failed because as Americans, we refuse to be terrorized."
Boston has held emotional tributes to the dead -- eight-year-old Martin Richard, Boston University graduate student Lu Lingzi of China and Krystle Campbell, a restaurant manager.
More than 100 of the wounded have left Boston hospitals and fewer than 10 remain in critical condition.
Trail of blood led to Boston marathon bomber
WATERTOWN, Massachusetts, April 19: A trail of blood led to accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as he hid inside a boat after eluding one of the biggest manhunts ever staged in the United States.
Exhausted and wounded, the 19-year-old, whose brother was killed earlier Friday, staged a final gun battle with his pursuers before he gave in to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) negotiators.
Tsarnaev was in "serious condition" at Beth Israel Deaconess hospital in Boston as the city celebrated his capture with street parties.
Those festivities could so easily have been a new night of anguish for the Boston region, facing growing tension after the bombs left at the marathon finish line on Monday killed three people and injured about 180.
Boston investigators had just held a press conference at which they virtually admitted that Tsarnaev had escaped when the lucky break came.
Tsarnaev had already been wounded overnight in a gun battle with police in which his elder brother Tamerlan was killed.
"We know he didn´t go straight to the boat," which was outside a security zone that had been painstakingly searched by thousands of heavily-armed officers, said Boston police chief Ed Davis.
2 Boston police officers shot, wounded; suspect dead
"We found blood in the car that he abandoned, we found blood inside the house behind the perimeter," he added. "We had no indication that he had gotten outside of the perimeter. It was very chaotic."
"A man had gone out of his house after being inside the house all day" because of a lockdown ordered by authorities, Davis explained to reporters after the dramatic capture.
"He saw blood on a boat in the backyard. He then opened the tarp on the top of the boat and he looked in and saw a man covered with blood."
The man telephoned police and at the same time, a police helicopter used infra-red equipment to determine there was a human in the boat.
"We exchanged gunfire with the suspect who was inside the boat, and ultimately, the hostage rescue team of the FBI made an entry into the boat and removed the suspect who was still alive," Davis told a press conference.
The negotiation team had tried to make Tsarnaev give himself up.
Police teams also fired flash grenades in a bid to stun the suspect into surrender.
Tsarnaev was given first aid on the lawn next to the boat before being taken away in an ambulance.
The boat had not been searched before because it was outside of the police perimeter set up as the hunt intensified.
Noisy celebrations erupted on Franklin Street, where the standoff unfolded, and beyond after the arrest.
Crowds cheered and applauded police as they packed up equipment and drove away from the house. There were also festivities around Boylston Street in central Boston -- scene of Monday´s carnage.
"Let´s Go Boston" and "USA, USA," crowds chanted, with some people climbing onto car roofs while others danced in the streets.
"It has been so tense all week," said neighbor Susan Nolan. "I was so nervous when I heard that the police were planning to pull out and he had not been caught."
Macabre tweet to Boston from terror suspect: ´stay safe´
WASHINGTON, April 19: Just hours after Monday´s Boston Marathon bombings, one of the brothers accused of staging the attack urged his followers on Twitter to "stay safe people."
As the authorities hunted for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, attention focused on the 19-year-old´s social media accounts for clues about his life and potential motivation for allegedly setting bombs that killed three people and wounded more than 180.
Tsarnaev was captured in the Boston suburb of Watertown late Friday, less than 24 hours after his 26-year-old brother and alleged accomplice Tamerlan was killed in a gunbattle with police.
Friends of Tsarnaev confirmed he was an active Twitter user, firing off messages under the handle @J_tsar.
"Ain´t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people," he tweeted at 8:04 pm on Monday, just hours after Boston was rocked by twin explosions that police say he set with his brother.
It was one of a dozen messages he posted on the microblogging site in the hours and days after the tragedy.
A tweet one week prior to the blasts may have offered cryptic hints at what was to come: "If you have the knowledge and the inspiration all that´s left is to take action," @J_tsar tweeted on April 8.
"Tat my name on you girl so i know it´s real oh and make sure to spell it right, its spelled Dzhokhar," he posted on May 5.
His followers soared to more than 58,000 in the hours after he was named a prime suspect.
His Twitter page is adorned with the emblem of the FC Anzhi Makhachkala soccer team, in the southern Russian region of Dagestan where, according to his uncle, Dzhokhar was born.
A perusal of the 1,099 tweets posted by @J_tsar portray an everyday kid with a wide variety of interests: sports, hip-hop lyrics, girls, Islam, TV shows like "Breaking Bad" and cars.
"I need me a tall beautiful woman, but just beautiful works too," he wrote last April.
On January 23, he sounded down on college life. "Back to terrible food, hot pockets and school bs."
Some friends who say they went to high school with him have posted their disbelief at how their classmate could be responsible for the worst terror attack on US soil since the September 11, 2001 suicide plane strikes.
"Yeah he went to rindge, he graduated with me and we had a few classes together," wrote longtime Twitter friend "Samantha," referring to their time at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, in Massachusetts.
Dzhokhar had exchanged tweets with Samantha as far back as November 2011.
One message from August 2012, a response to a user who has since locked his tweets and made them unviewable, provides a jolt to those scrolling through Dzhokhar´s account.
"Boston marathon isn´t a good place to smoke tho," he wrote.
The final message on his account is a Wednesday retweet of a comment by Mufti Ismail Menk of Zimbabwe.
Menk later condemned the Boston attacks on his own Twitter feed, saying "the perpetrators must face justice."
One of Dzhokhar´s post-bombing tweets was a hair-raising response to a fellow Twitter user.
"What ´god hates dead people?´ Or victims of tragedies? Lol those people are cooked," Dzhokhar wrote.
