Boston: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon blasts, had objected to a sermon at a Cambridge mosque in which the speaker compared the Prophet with civil rights leader Martin Luther King, a mosque official said.
Yusufi Vali, executive director of the Islamic Society of Boston, which runs the mosque, said 26-year-old Tsarnaev told the speaker, "You are a kafir [an unbeliever]," and said he was contaminating people`s minds and was a hypocrite.
Vali said, "The congregation then said, `You are the hypocrite.` The congregation shouted him out of the mosque."
The holiday named for the civil rights leader who advocated non-violent protest was about three months before the attacks on Marathon last week that killed three people.
Tsarnaev, who was killed during a gun battle with police on Friday, was allegedly joined in the bombing plot by his brother, Dzokhar, 19, who was captured on same day.
It was the second time that Tsarnaev had made an outburst during one of the speaker`s sermons, Vali was quoted as saying by the Boston Globe.
"There was nothing about it that would suggest that he would kill a person," Vali told the daily.
Vali said Tsarnaev "was just expressing his opinion about his belief" and it wasn?t seen as something that would rise to the level of alerting authorities.
Tsarnaev`s earlier outburst had come in November. He had started attending the mosque occasionally about a year ago, Vali added.
PTI
