11 Jul 2013

Boston bomber accused pleads not guilty

9:11 am on 11 July 2013

Boston Marathon bomber accused Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleaded not guilty to all charges on Wednesday.

Tsarnaev, 19, faces 30 charges including using a weapon of mass destruction in the two blasts on 15 April that killed three people and wounded about 264 people.

His elder brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in the subsequent manhunt during which a police officer was shot dead.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was eventually found, badly wounded, hiding in a boat in a backyard.

The accused appeared in a federal court in Boston on Wednesday dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, with his left arm in a cast. The hearing lasted seven minutes.

He faces the death penalty if convicted.

The BBC reports the brothers were from a family of ethnic Chechen Muslims from Russia, who had been living in the United States for about a decade.