Boston Mourns Slain MIT Officer

BOSTON — As bagpipes wailed, more than 4,000 mourners paid their respects Wednesday to an MIT police officer who authorities say was ambushed in his cruiser by the Boston Marathon bombers, while U.S. investigators trying to get to the bottom of the plot looked for answers from the Tsarnaev brothers' parents in Russia.

In a sign of how things were slowly and painfully getting back to normal in the Boston, the area around the finish line on Boylston Street reopened nine days after the tragedy, freshly poured cement still drying on the repaired sidewalk.

On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, lawmakers are asking whether a failure to share intelligence may have contributed to the bombings April 15 that killed three people and wounded more than 260.

MIT students, faculty and staff, law enforcement officials from across the nation and Vice President Joe Biden gathered on the campus in Cambridge to remember Sean Collier, a MIT police officer who authorities say was gunned down by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev three days after the bombing.

The line of mourners stretched for a half-mile. They had to make their way through tight security, including metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was listed in fair condition as he recovered from wounds suffered in a getaway attempt last week. He could face the death penalty if convicted of plotting with his older brother to set off the shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs that ripped through the crowd at the 26.2-mile race. His 26-year-old brother died in a shootout last week.

Many Boylston Street businesses — banks, restaurants, gyms — remained closed. But a nearby Starbucks opened for the first time and allowed customers to retrieve purses, cellphones, school bags and other belongings left behind as people fled in terror.

"I don't think there's going to be a sense of normalcy for a while," said Tom Champoux, who works a few blocks away, as he pointed to the cement and boarded-up windows. "There are scars here that will be with us for a long time."

U.S. investigators traveled to the predominantly Muslim province of Dagestan in southern Russia and were in contact with the brothers' parents, hoping to shed light on the deadly attack.

The parents, Anzor Tsarnaev and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, plan to fly to the United States on Thursday, the father was quoted telling the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. The family has said it wants to bring Tamerlan Tsarnaev's body back to Russia.

Investigators are looking into whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who spent six months in Russia's turbulent Caucasus region in 2012, was influenced by the religious extremists who have waged an insurgency against Russian forces in the area for years. The brothers have roots in Dagestan and neighboring Chechnya, but had lived in the U.S. for about a decade.

After closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill with the FBI and other law enforcement officials on Tuesday, lawmakers said it appeared that the brothers were motivated by a strain of anti-American Islamic extremism, that they were radicalized via the Internet instead of by direct contact with any terrorist groups, and that the older brother was the driving force in the bomb plot.

Conflicting stories appeared to emerge about which agencies knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev's trip to Russia last year.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate panel that her agency knew about Tsarnaev's journey to his homeland. But Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the FBI "told me they had no knowledge of him leaving or coming back."

Information-sharing failures between agencies prompted an overhaul of the U.S. intelligence system after 9/11.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it doesn't appear yet that anyone "dropped the ball." But he said he was asking all the federal agencies for more information about who knew what about the suspect.

"There still seem to be serious problems with sharing information, including critical investigative information ... not only among agencies but also within the same agency in one case," said committee member Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

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Associated Press writers Bridget Murphy and Bob Salsberg in Boston, Lynn Berry in Moscow, and Kimberly Dozier, Adam Goldman, Eric Tucker, Matt Apuzzo, and Eileen Sullivan in Washington contributed to this report.