However, the Portland Chief of Police maintains that Maine is still a safe state with only a few loosely affiliated immigrant gangs!

It’s all over the news, but as usual the UK press (Daily Mail!) is covering the story in its famously direct fashion, no beating around the bush about the nationalities of the gang bangers like the defensive-sounding Maine papers.

Longtime readers of RRW know that Maine has become a magnet for African refugees—as refugees resettled directly there by the US State Department, as secondary migrants, and as asylum seekers.  See our lengthy archive on Maine, here.   See especially our 2009 post about the Somali migration to Maine for its generous welfare.

By the way, when you check out the Portland paper (the Sun Journal), note that one of the gangs they are watching is the Somali True Bloods.

Here is the UK Daily Mail (Hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’):

The 9mm pistol that Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev used to murder one police officer and gravely wound another came from a brutal street gang in Maine that is allegedly led by an Eritrean immigrant.

Tracking the path of the Ruger P95 semiautomatic pistol has led investigators to believe he may have dealt drugs to finance the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that killed three spectators and injured more than 260 others.

Drug money is also believed to have funded the 26-year-old’s 2012 trip to Chechnya and Dagestan in Russia, where he became involved in radical Islam.

[….]

They found that it was legally purchased at a Cabella’s sporting goods store outside Portland, Maine, in November 2011 by Danny Sun Jr – a Los Angeles native. The gun typically sells for about $375.

Sun told investigators that he gave the pistol to Biniam Tsegai, a 27-year-old Eritrean immigrant who goes by the street name ‘Icy.’

The Times reports that Tsegai is a reputed leader of a Portland, Maine, street gang with a lengthy arrest record – including robbery, criminal trespass and reckless driving.

In May 2013 – a month after the marathon bombings – Tsegai was arrested and indicted on federal drug trafficking charges. Prosecutors noted that the drugs he is accused of trafficking were brought from Boston to Maine.

Tsegai has refused to talk to authorities about the Ruger pistol – or anything else.

However, Tsarnaev’s possession of the weapon have strengthened their suspicions that he was involved in drug trafficking.

This last bit in the story is a terrible black mark on investigators.  That these murders linked to Tsarnaev were not solved (and still aren’t solved as far as I know) in a timely fashion is a travesty.

They have not been able to prove his involvement, but suspect he had something to do with the September 11, 2011 murder of three men in an apartment outside Boston who were found with the throats slit. Marijuana and $1,000 in cash was found sprinkled around the crime scene.

Besides Maine, where are the Eritreans?

They are in Washington DC in very large numbers.  The State Department and its contractors don’t normally resettle new refugees to DC (the well-off and well-connected might be troubled by that), but Eritreans are going to DC as secondary migrants having been resettled elsewhere in the US.

Here is a lengthy story, also thanks to ‘pungentpeppers,’ about how their kinfolk in Africa are being kidnapped and ransomed and the DC Eritreans are stressed about it.

According to wikipedia about 50% of the population of Eritrea is Christian and 48% Muslim.

From the Washington City Paper:

Eritreans began migrating to the U.S. in small numbers in the 1960s, when the country was still part of Ethiopia, according to Hepner. Subsequent waves in the 1980s and over the past five years brought thousands more, mainly as part of refugee resettlement programs, and the D.C. area has long been home to one of the largest communities in the country, Hepner says.

Read it all.

This is our 30th post in our Boston bomber category, click here, for more on the case and that grateful refugee family.