FBI agent cleared in killing of Boston suspect's friend had controversial past

Special agent faced lawsuits for assault and false arrest
Supporters of victim Ibragim Todashev demand answers

Supporters of a Chechen national shot dead by the FBI during the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing are demanding answers after the special agent involved was revealed to be a former police officer who faced lawsuits for assault and false arrest.

The Department of Justice and Florida state attorney Jeff Ashton both cleared the agent of any wrongdoing in the May 2013 death of Ibragim Todashev, 27. Todashev, a friend of bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed during an interrogation at his apartment in Orlando.

Ashton concluded in March of this year that Todashev, a martial arts fighter, had lunged forward with a metal pole after throwing a coffee table top, and that the agent was justified in firing seven shots to “halt the immediate threat of death or serious bodily harm”.

But the 161-page report of Ashton’s investigation, the release of which unwittingly led to the Boston Globe on Wednesday naming 41-year-old FBI special agent Aaron McFarlane as the shooter, makes no mention of McFarlane’s past.

During a four-year career as an officer with the Oakland police department in California a decade ago, McFarlane was named with another officer in two lawsuits alleging brutality, faced four internal affairs investigations, was accused of falsifying reports and abruptly stopped cooperating as a witness in a trial against colleagues accused of beatings and false arrests.

A spokesman for the city of Oakland confirmed that the lawsuits were settled for a total of $32,500 without any admission of liability, and that McFarlane left the department in 2004 on a pension of $50,450 a year. He has worked at the FBI’s Boston field office since 2008.

The omission of details of McFarlane’s history in law enforcement from Ashton’s report has alarmed the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which represents Todashev’s family and which is conducting its own investigation into the shooting.

“The agent’s history speaks volumes,” said Hassan Shibly, the group’s executive director, who has written to Ashton and the Department of Justice asking why his record appeared to form no part of their inquiries.

“There are a whole host of things that make us question the validity of his testimony and question whether he unnecessarily provoked Mr Todashev during the interrogation,” he told the Guardian.

“Ashton’s report focused completely on the victim but there’s practically nothing about the shooter’s history, which suggests they either didn’t know and didn’t do their jobs properly or they were deliberately holding it back.”

Ashton, who did not interview McFarlane for his investigation, and relied instead on his written statements, did not return a call seeking comment on Wednesday.

A spokesman for the FBI’s Boston field office, meanwhile, said the bureau never commented on the identity of its agents “as a matter of policy and sometimes as a matter of law”.

McFarlane’s naming served “no public interest or service” it said in a statement. “The personal safety of the agent continues to be of concern to the Boston Division, and publishing the agent’s name potentially places the agent and his family at risk for reprisal.”

According to the Boston Globe, Massachusetts state troopers Curtis Cinelli and Joel Gagne accompanied McFarlane to the interrogation of Todashev, who knew Tsarnaev from a martial arts gym they once attended together in Boston. Todashev had just confessed his involvement in a 2011 triple murder in Waltham in which Tsarnaev was also considered a suspect, Ashton’s report concludes.

The identities of the three investigators present at Todashev’s apartment were first published 10 days ago on a blog about the April 2013 marathon bombing, which killed three and injured more than 260. The site revealed that redactions in Ashton’s report, including the blacking out of their names, could easily be removed by running the document through a free online software programme.

The newspaper said it had used the method to reveal the names, then matched McFarlane’s full name and date of birth to public records from Massachusetts, New Hampshire and California to confirm his identity.

The lawsuits against McFarlane related to an incident in May 2002 when he and fellow officer Stephen Nowak were called to Oakland’s Highland hospital. Plaintiff Robert Girard alleged that the officers beat a suspect named Michael Cole then attacked him and illegally arrested him when he tried to photograph them.

Cole received $22,500 in a 2003 settlement from the city of Oakland that included the dismissal of the charges, and Girard won $10,000.

Vaughn Spunaugle, an attorney based in El Sobrante, California, who represented Girard, told the Guardian he recalled nothing unusual about the case. But Ian Kelley, Cole’s San Francisco-based lawyer, told the Globe: “I would be shocked to learn that the Aaron McFarlane we sued a decade ago could have gone on to have a career with the FBI.”

At the time, the Oakland police department was embroiled in the so-called Riders controversy, in which four officers were fired and charged with beatings, kidnappings and the falsification of evidence. None was convicted after two separate trials but in 2003 the city of Oakland agreed to pay $10.9m to 119 plaintiffs to settle a civil rights lawsuit in federal court.

Records show that McFarlane was a defence witness in the first Riders trial but was accused by prosecutors of falsifying records and pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination. The Globe said that McFarlane, in later testimony given under immunity, insisted he had done nothing wrong.

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