A website tied to the Chechen insurgency in Russia Saturday called the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombings "completely muddled" and suggested the arrest of two members of a Chechen-immigrant family was part of an anti-Chechnya "PR campaign."
Kavkaz Center, a website that has long been the main international outlet for supporters of Chechen independence from Russia, has posted several blog items casting doubt on the notion that suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were responsible for the attacks.
"This is quickly becoming the biggest media cover-up of all time," the site's "Department of Monitoring" asserted in one post, which links to an American conspiracy site that blames the attack on an American military organization called "The Craft."
Another post, in Russian and first noted by NBC News, alleged that the the entire incident was aimed at giving President Vladimir Putin an excuse to crack down on Chechens in advance of the Sochi Olympics.
Yet another Russian-language post suggested that the suspects could not have had the technical capacity to make the bombs.
The Chechen opposition has grown weaker, more radical, and more closely tied to international terror groups over nearly two decades of intermittent conflict with the Russian government. Its leaders have been involved in brutal terror attacks inside Russia, though some American experts also believe their claims that in some cases (notably a set of bombings of apartment buildings in Russia in 1999) Russian security forces may in fact hav engaged in the sort of conspiracy that the Chechen site is today alleging, without a shred of evidence, of U.S. authorities.
The site today cited fringe American websites, including Alex Jones's Inforwars, to make its case for the innocence of the Chechen-American suspects.