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Suspicions that the Boston Marathon bombing plot was bigger than just suspects (and brothers) Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsaranaev could be coming true. The Boston Police Department has announced the arrest of "three additional suspects" today, more than two weeks after the blasts on Marathon Monday killed three and injured more than 100.
So, is this good news for America? Or bad news?
Maybe both.
The identities of the additional suspects are being withheld, although as yet unsubstantiated rumors are running wild that they are college students. The Boston Globe, which had reported an arrest of three UMass Dartmouth students on its Twitter account the night Dzhokhar was arrested, is now once again mentioning a connection between the now infamous student and his peers. A source told the Globe that the people arrested are all students who helped the young bombing suspect after the fact.
Again, that's unsubstantiated.
The Boston PD followed up its arrest announcement -- which was made via the law enforcement Twitter account -- with a promise that there is no public safety threat at this time.
That last police announcement was meant to be reassuring, I'm sure, but it's hard to feel anything close to reassured as we face the idea that the Tsarnaev brothers are not the end of this.
Have we all thought it? Of course. From theories about what Tamerlan Tsaranev was up to while he was back in Russia and how he relates to the dead Jihadist William Plotnikov to the debate over whether the female DNA found on the bomb belonged to Tamerlan's wife, Katherine Russell, most of us have read the news stories and pondered whether the two main suspects received assistance or were mere cogs in a larger terrorist wheel.
But I will be the first to confess there was a comfort in the lack of arrests since Tamerlan and Dzhokhar's dramatic takedowns.
Tamerlan is dead. Dzhokhar is in custody.
If this was just the two brothers who cooked up this cowardly scheme, we as Americans could go to sleep at night knowing that the bad guys weren't going to hurt us anymore.
If it was just them, we have only two faces of evil haunting our dreams.
Additional arrests are inevitable -- be they people who were involved in the before or after of the bombing -- but they're still unsettling. They force us to face our fear that this evil deed was likely part of something bigger than just these two young suspects, two loose cannons.
These arrests remind us all over again that we don't know what our neighbors, our friends, even our own family members are thinking and doing, that the next terrorist could be walking among us.
Did you expect this news from the Boston Police today? How does it make you feel?
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