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Abdul-Baki Todashev, father of a Chechen immigrant Ibragim Todashev, who was shot dead by an FBI agent while being questioned about his ties to Boston Marathon bombings suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, said Thursday that he regrets allowing his son to go to the U.S.

Ibragim Todashev, 27, was a mixed martial arts fighter who had trained with Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Boston, and his father said they had bonded because of their shared interests and heritage as Chechens from southern Russia.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a shootout with police days after the April 15 terrorist attack.

Ibragim Todashev was killed Wednesday after an altercation with an FBI agent during a meeting with the agent and two Massachusetts state troopers at his home in central Florida. Law enforcement officers say that during the meeting, he had implicated himself in an unsolved 2011 triple murder.

Abdul-Baki Todashev said he was worried that with his son was dead, the FBI could now pin any crime on him.

“Out of fear of the lawlessness in Chechnya, I sent him to the U.S., because it seemed like the safest country at the time,” the distraught father told the Associated Press.

“Now I’m thinking about how to bring home his body. As it turns out I sent him to his death.”

Abdul-Baki Todashev said his son Ibragim, who has a previous arrest for aggravated battery after he left a man unconscious following a fight over a park spot, is “not capable” of killing anyone.

“There is a clear picture emerging that this is all fabricated,” Abdul-Baki Todashev told the Boston Globe.

“They killed my son and then they made up a reason to explain it.”

Friends and family members of the 2011 murder victims reacted to news of Ibragim Todashev’s alleged confession on social media.

On a Facebook memorial for victim Raphael Teken, the moderator of the page wrote: “Whether we ever know exactly what happened, there is one thing we surely know and that is that Rafi deserved a much better fate.

“He was funny, kind, joyful and generous.

“All of us that knew him knew [his death] couldn’t have been about anything he did, but are now horrified by what it may have been about.”

Facebook user Tony Porter wrote: “I’m disappointed that we will never really get to experience true justice for our friend or know the reasons for what happened despite the fact that both alleged suspects are now deceased.

“I don’t know how you are supposed to feel when your friend’s killer gets killed, but I don’t feel <<relieved>> like I thought I would.”

Moderators of a Facebook memorial for victim Erik Weissman wrote: “Hoping for some closure” and posted a photo of him with the caption: “Forever young, forever beautiful, forever in our hearts.”

Ibragim Todashev was shot dead by an FBI agent while being questioned about his ties to Boston suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Ibragim Todashev was shot dead by an FBI agent while being questioned about his ties to Boston suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev

A friend who said he went to high school with Erik Weissman commented: “That playful grin is the Erik that will live on in my memory… Let’s hope [this] represents at least a small step towards some kind of <<closure>> – if that even exits – for his nearest and dearest.”

Ibragim Todashev’s estranged wife, Reniya Manukyan, denied her husband’s alleged involvement in the 2011 triple murder, but she noted that he did travel back to Boston in the summer of that year.

He “had nothing to hide”, she told ABC News.

“He wasn’t involved. So he was not even nervous [to talk with the FBI].”

Reniya Manukyan and her husband separated in November. She said they lived in Atlanta before moving to Orlando in late 2011.

She also said that agents had questioned her several times and even stopped her at the airport when she returned from a trip to Chechnya several weeks after the Boston bombings.

Abdul-Baki Todashev said his son – the second of 12 children – was at university when he got an opportunity to go to the U.S. to study English about five or six years ago. He said he later agreed to his son’s request to remain in the U.S. “because it seemed like the safest country”.

Chechnya has been ravaged by two wars between separatist fighters and Russian federal troops since 1994, and remains troubled by periodic outbreaks of violence. The family’s red-brick house on the outskirts of Grozny, the Chechen capital, still bears the marks of shrapnel.

Abdul-Baki Todashev said his son gave up martial arts because of an injury and later held a number of jobs, including as a driver at a retirement home, before moving to Florida within the last year. The father said Ibragim had planned to come to Chechnya this week to visit his extended family, but was asked by the FBI to delay his trip.

Abdul-Baki Todashev said he had learned of his son’s death from a phone call from one of his son’s friends, who also had been questioned by the FBI. He said the friend, whom he didn’t name, told him that both of them had been pressured to confess to the murders, but that they were innocent.

The FBI gave no details on why it was interested in Ibragim Todashev except to say that he was being questioned as part of the Boston investigation. However, two officials briefed on the investigation said he had implicated himself as having been involved in a 2011 triple murder in a Boston suburb; investigators now suspect that Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have been involved in the unsolved crime.

Law enforcement officials believe, partly based on Ibragim Todashev’s alleged confession, that Todashev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev carried out the 2011 killings after a drug deal turned violent. The suspects didn’t want the three victims to be able to identify them, so they s**t their throats, sources told NBC.

Authorities had gone to Ibragim Todashev’s home late Tuesday with evidence suggesting that Todashev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and Tsarnaev’s younger brother, Dzhokhar, were involved in the 2011 killings, according to reports.

No suspects had been arrested in that case, in which three men were found in an apartment in Waltham, Massachusetts on the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks with their throats cut and marijuana covering their bodies.

Massachusetts investigators had reported earlier this month that they were uncovering “mounting evidence” that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, were involved in the sl**ing. One of the victims, Brendan Mess, was a close friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s.

Authorities said they have no reason to believe that Ibragim Todashev had any involvement in the Boston Marathon bombings.

The FBI has been investigating Ibragim Todashev for the last month, questioning him several times regarding his ties to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed by police in a shootout following the deadly April 15 marathon bombings. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, has been charged in connection with the bombings and is being held at a prison medical center outside Boston.

Khusen Taramov, a friend of Ibragim Todashev’s, confirmed that Todashev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev knew each other. He said they had been in contact via phone or Skype about a week before the bombings.

Ibragim Todashev was arrested in an unrelated incident on May 4 for aggravated battery after he left a man unconscious in the parking lot of a shopping mall.

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New pictures from the Boston Marathon taken in the moments after the deadly blasts that left three dead and nearly 180 injured, show that the explosives packed inside rigged pressure cookers were planted next to a Russian flag that hung among other banners along the street.

It has been revealed that the prime suspects in the bombings are Chechen brothers, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his 19-year-old sibling, Dzhokhar.

If investigators prove that the Tsarnaev brothers were aligned with the decades-long Chechen fight for independence, the Boston attacks would mark the first time that Chechen separatists had struck on foreign soil.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been captured Friday night following an intense manhunt that culminated in a police gunfight in Watertown.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who is suspected of having received military training abroad last year, was shot dead during an armed confrontation with authorities the night before.

The Tsranaev family, who are ethnic Chechens, lived in Kyrgyzstan and then moved to Dagestan in the 1990s before finally seeking asylum in the US in 2002.

“This family is a very rare episode. Very few make it here, even fewer get green cards,” Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation, told USA Today.

According to the newspaper, fewer than 200 Chechen immigrants currently living in the US, and most of them reside in the Boston area.

Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev planted one of the bombs under the Russian flag on Boston Marathon route

Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev planted one of the bombs under the Russian flag on Boston Marathon route

About 70% of the Chechen immigrants are women because very few men are granted asylum over terrorism concerns.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Chechnya has been locked in a bloody struggle for independence with Russia, which had been punctuated with nearly a dozen terrorist attacks on Russian soil.

The latest bombing took place January 2011 when the Domodedovo airport in Moscow was rocked by an explosion that killed at least 6 people and left more than 130 injured. Islamist insurgent Daku Umarov later claimed responsibility for the attack.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was born in Kyrgyzstan but identified himself as a proud Chechen on a social media site as well as on his Twitter account.

He wrote: “Proud to be from Chechnya, I miss my homeland,” accompanied by the hashtag “chechnyanpower”.

His older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was a competitive boxer in Boston, said in a 2009 interview that if he cannot represent Chechnya in the Olympics, he would rather become a naturalized US citizen and compete for America than for Russia.

Since the bombings in Boston, Russian and Chechen officials alike were quick to point out that the Tsarnaevs have been out of the country for more than two decades and have no ties to Chechnya.

One explanation for the Boston bombings is that Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were swayed by radical jihadism rather than Chechen separatism, the Washington Post reported.

FBI officials confirmed Friday that they questioned Tamerlan Tsaranaev in 2011 at the request of the Russian government about possible ties to Chechen separatists, but he was let go because the investigation found “no derogatory information”.

Russian forces officially left Chechnya in 2009, but their departure was marked by a rise in violence in neighboring countries in the Caucasus region, including Dagestan, where the Tsranaevs once sought refuge, and where the brothers’ parents currently reside.

According to an official familiar with Tamerlan Tsranaev’s travels last year, the 26-year-old spent six months in Dagestan.

Travel records obtained by NBC 4 New York show that Tamerlan Tsarnaev left New York January 12, 2012, en route to Moscow. He returned to JFK July 17.

Documents show a photo of a bearded Tamerlan Tsarnaev. According to the records, he was born October 21, 1986 and first entered US through JFK July 19, 2003.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, said in a statement that attempts “to draw a parallel between Chechnya and the Tsarnaevs, if they are guilty, are futile. They grew up in the US, and their views and beliefs were formed there. The roots of the evil should be looked for in America”.

Russian authorities said that they were unable to provide their American counterparts with any valuable information about the Tsranaevs since the family had lived out of the country for many years.

One trail in the search for clues about why two ethnic Chechen brothers may have carried out the Boston Marathon bombings leads to a sleepy town in Kyrgyzstan where former neighbors recall a quiet family that was never in trouble.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are remembered as decent and obedient boys from their time in the 1990s in the small community of Chechens in Tokmok, a leafy town under the snow-capped Tien Shan mountains outside the capital Bishkek.

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