Ibragim Todashev (Orlando Police Dept.)An unidentified FBI agent shot and killed a man in Orlando, Fla., early Wednesday after questioning him about his link to the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.
Dave Couvertier, a special agent and spokesman for the FBI's Tampa field office, told Yahoo News that the shooting is under investigation. He identified the man as Ibragim Todashev, a 27-year-old Chechen-born Orlando resident and apparent acquaintance of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers suspected of planning and carrying out the terror attack at last month's Boston Marathon.
The shooting occurred just after midnight at an apartment complex in Orlando, Couvertier said. "The agent encountered the suspect while conducting official duties," the agent said. "An FBI post-shooting incident review team has been dispatched from Washington, D.C., and expected to arrive in Orlando within 24 hours."
FBI spokesman Paul Bresson told the Associated Press that Todashev "was fatally shot when he initiated a violent confrontation." The FBI agent, Bresson said, "acted on an imminent threat and shot Todashev." The FBI agent was transported to a local hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
Khusen Taramov, a friend of Todashev, told local television reporters that he and Todashev were interviewed by the FBI for three hours on Tuesday.
"They were talking to us," Taramov told WESH-TV. "And they said they need him for a little more, for a couple more hours, and I left, and they told me they’re going to bring him back. They never brought him back. ... He felt inside he was going to get shot. I told him, 'Everything is going to be fine, don't worry about it.' He said, 'I have a really bad feeling.'"
Todashev met Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Boston while competing in mixed martial arts, Taramov said.
"They met a few times because [Todashev] was an MMA fighter and [Tsarnaev] was a boxer," Taramov told WKMG-TV. "They just knew each other. That’s it."
Taramov said that Todashev had planned to travel back to Chechnya. "He had a [plane] ticket to New York," Taramov said. "From there, he was going to go home. [The FBI was] pushing him to stay, saying, ‘We want to interview you one last time.'"
According to the Orlando Sun Sentinel, Todashev was arrested earlier this month on aggravated assault charges:
In that incident, Todashev told deputies he got in a fight with a man over a parking space at the Orlando Premuium Outlet mall and "was only fighting to protect his knee because he had surgery in March," according to the arrest report.
The Sheriff's office report says that two men were fighting and one—later identified as Todashev—was leaving the scene in a vehicle, while the other was on the ground, appeared unconscious, and surrounded by "a considerable amount of blood."
Deputies pursued Todashev, pulled him over and ordered him out of his car at gunpoint, according to the report. The victim, who had a split upper lip and "several teeth knocked out of place," did not want to press charges, according to the report.
Four days after the bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a late-night shootout with police in Watertown, Mass. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was later arrested and charged in connection with the bombings, which left three people dead and wounded 275.
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