Two investigations released within an hour of one another Tuesday found no wrongdoing in the fatal shooting of Ibragim Todashev.
The 27-year-old mixed martial arts fighter was killed in Orlando last May while being questioned by both the FBI and Massachusetts State Police about his ties to Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and their alleged involvement in a 2011 triple murder in Waltham.
The reports, conducted separately by the office of Florida State Attorney Jeffrey Ashton and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, both conclude that the FBI agent who shot Todashev justifiably acted in self-defense and that no civil rights laws were violated by law enforcement.
Among the details revealed in the more than 1,000 pages released:
The Justice Department report also touched on alleged civil rights violations of Todashev associates who were incarcerated or deported during the investigation. The report concludes “speculation that these persons were deported to conceal information is unfounded” and that the deportations that took place were related to issues concerning immigration status.
Hassan Shibly, a Todashev family attorney and executive director of the Florida Council on American Islamic Relations, said last week that the treatment of Todashev’s associates has been a grave concern to him and other civil rights advocates.
“Only last week, we documented that the FBI made sure that [Todashev’s] closest friends were either forcibly removed from the country or prohibited from returning to the country,” Shibly said.
Shibly added that he is looking forward to reviewing the reports and plans to compare it with an independent investigation he and other lawyers are conducting. That investigation is ongoing.
James Edwards can be reached at james_edwards@wgbh.org. Follow him on Twitter: @thejamesedwards.
Carol Rose, the executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, gave her initial reaction to the reports on Greater Boston:
