(JTA) — Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may never speak again, the expatriate Israeli director of the Boston hospital where Tsarnaev is being treated told an Israeli news site.
Tsarnaev, 19, was wounded in his throat, Kevin Ilan Tabb of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told Ynet.
Tabb is a board member of Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem, where he studied medicine and completed his residency.
"Unfortunately, I have had a lot of experience with these types of injuries after years of treating people injured in terror attacks in Israel," Tabb, 49, told Ynet.
He added, "We have a few Israeli doctors in the emergency room, and the director of the ER is also Israeli. But most of the physicians at the hospital are not Israeli, and they functioned exceptionally well."
Police have been unable to question Tsarnaev, a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth who was captured following a 24-hour chase that left the Boston area in lockdown.
Tsarnaev was captured Friday night hiding in a winterized boat in the Boston suburb of Watertown, Mass., and was hospitalized in serious condition. He was wounded during an early Friday morning shootout with police that killed his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, who also had been a suspect in the April 15 marathon bombing.
During the chase through Boston-area suburbs, a campus officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was killed and a transit policeman was seriously wounded.
The two bombs allegedly planted by the Tsarnaevs at the marathon’s finish line killed three people and wounded more than 180.
“I’m confident that we have the courage and the resilience and the spirit to overcome these challenges and to go forward,” President Obama said in a statement from the White House shortly after Tsarnaev was captured.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev reportedly became indoctrinated in radical Islam and influenced his younger brother. Both Tsarnaevs, originally from the Chechnya area of Russia, are naturalized U.S. citizens.
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