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Report suggests alleged Marathon bombing mastermind was 'hearing voices'

BOSTON (MyFoxBoston.com) -- A report released following a 5-month investigation by a Boston newspaper suggests alleged Boston Marathon mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was hearing voices and that he may not have been "radicalized" prior to the April 15 attacks.

FOX 25's Heather Hegedus spoke with one of the lead reporters in the Boston Globe investigation Sunday. David Filipov says he didn't find a smoking gun, instead he ruled some theories out while coming across some new ones.

Nothing could ever justify the unthinkable acts of April 15, 2013, but the Globe's former Moscow bureau chief, an expert in the region where the Tsarnaev family came from, set out looking to understand what could motivate a troubled individual. He also wanted assurances that there aren't others out there, like alleged bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Rather than finding concrete answers, Filipov says he found a lot of information casting doubt on federal investigators' claims that Tsarnaev was recruited by Islamic radicals.

Filipov traveled to the southern Russian provinces of Dagestan and Kyrgyzstan, tracing Tamerlan's 2012 trip, which some have suggested could have been a training trip.

After traveling a world away to get the real story, Filipov found that the answer to "Why?" might lie in the U.S. The real devil might have been in Tamerlan's own mind.

"I don't have a diagnosis," said Filipov, "But you have doctors who say things like schizophrenia, people who saw the parents, then you start to say okay that added together with, 'Where's the smoking gun, where's the Muslim radicals where they train? I didn't find them. They're not there."

Filipov says a Tsarnaev family friend, a doctor, told him he had conversations with a psychiatrist treating both of Tamerlan's parents for neurotic problems. He said Tamerlan himself was not being treated. That friend of the family, who is a urologist and not a specialist in mental health, speculates Tamerlan had some form of schizophrenia. He feels Tamerlan's marijuana use and possible head trauma from training as a boxer could have been a dangerous combination.

"A man that he went to Mosque with would talk to him about how he believes his mind is being controlled by some other entity that is making him do things. There is a friend of the family who says his mother told her that he had voices," Filipov explained.

Some survivors expressed their anger over the timing of the article, coming on the 8-month anniversary of the bombing. Marathon survivor, Marc Fucarile, isn't buying the theory.

"Wouldn't his coaches or school officials or friends have suggested he see a doctor? He was never treated," the Reading resident told FOX 25's Heather Hegedus. "The only people saying it are his parents and their friends and they have an agenda. There's no documentation."

The pictures the Globe commissioned for the front page and article, which recreated likely scenes from the Tsarnaevs' lives, were also bothersome to Fucarile.

"I'm disgusted with the choice to run a story that's nothing, but speculation and excuses on the front page of our hometown paper, on the 8-month anniversary of the bombing, and just 10 days before Christmas. It's classless. And the article doesn't give any answers. It proves nothing," said Fucarile.

Three people died and hundreds more were injured when two bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

Tamerlan was hit by a car driven by his brother and killed during a shootout in Watertown days after the bombings. The FBI is still conducting their own investigation into the brothers.