Broadside: New Questions in Todashev Case

(NECN) - The long-awaited findings on the killing of an associate of a Boston Marathon bombing suspect killed while being questioned by law enforcement officials last May was finally released Tuesday.

The U.S. Justice Department and Florida's state attorney released their reports on Ibragim Todashev, who was being interviewed by a FBI agent and a Massachusetts State Police trooper in his Orlando apartment.

Florida State Attorney Jeff Ashton's report says Todashev became agitated during the interview as he wrote a statement about his role in a 2011 triple homicide in Waltham, Mass., then flipped a coffee table in the air, knocked down the FBI agent and threatened the agent and trooper with a long pole. The agent then fired at least six shots, resulting in Todashev's death, the report says.

Carol Rose, executive director of ACLU of Massachusetts, says the reports are the first steps toward transparency, but raises more questions than answers.

"What was the role of the Massachusetts State Police? It's contradictory. Why were they down there? Under whose authority? Apparently they were recording? Under whose authority were they recording? The FBI doesn't do recordings. What happened to those recordings, and why did they turn them off just before the shooting? So many questions are raised by this that is really just begins to help us to piece together what happened, but it doesn't end the questions or the story," Rose says.

Susan Zalkind, a journalist who reported on the 2011 Waltham slayings and was close to one of the victims, says it's interesting to see what the officials' investigations looked at.

"Jeff Ashton says he's narrowly looking at what happened that night, if the agent felt that he was threatened by bodily harm or death, but he also confirms a lot of my reporting about action leading up to the shooting," she says, referring to her Boston Magazine article detailing the shooting and Waltham triple homicide.

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