MAKHACHKALA, Russia — During a six-month visit to his Russian homeland last year, the parents of the Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev said, he spent his time reading novels and reconnecting with family, not venturing into the shadowy world of the region's militants.
But now, investigators are looking into a range of suspected contacts Mr. Tsarnaev might have made in Dagestan, from days he might have spent in a fundamentalist Salafi mosque in Makhachkala, the capital, to time spent outside the city with a relative who is a prominent Islamist leader recently taken into custody by Russian authorities.
The emerging details of his time here have not fundamentally altered a prevailing view among American and Russian investigators that he was radicalized before his visit. However, there have been reports that he sought out contact with Islamist extremists, and was flagged as a potential recruit for the region's Islamic insurgency.
It remains unclear to what degree his months in Russia, which were punctuated by volleys of punishing attacks between the police and insurgents, might have changed his plans. But an official here, who said he did not have enough information to confirm or deny reports of Mr. Tsarnaev's contacts, said he had concluded that Mr. Tsarnaev intended to link up with militant Islamists — but left frustrated, having failed.
"My presumed theory is that he evidently came here, he was looking for contacts, but he did not find serious contacts, and if he did, they didn't trust him," said Habib Magomedov, a member of Dagestan's antiterrorism commission.
Mr. Tsarnaev, 26, died after a shootout with the police four days after the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15. His brother, Dzhokhar, 19, also suspected in the bombings, remains in a prison medical facility in Massachusetts.
Investigators in Russia are also looking into Tamerlan Tsarnaev's interactions online, and exploring whether he and a Canadian-born militant, William Plotnikov, might have been part of a larger group of diaspora Russian speakers who mobilized online, under the auspices of an organization based in Europe, a law enforcement official said.
Unearthing what investigators have learned became more difficult two weeks ago when President Vladimir V. Putin told reporters that, "to our great regret," Russian security services did not have operative information on the Tsarnaev brothers that they could have shared with American officials. The police in Dagestan have said Tamerlan Tsarnaev was not under surveillance.
Since then an official from the Anti-Extremism Center, a federal agency under Russia's Interior Ministry, confirmed for The Associated Press that operatives had filmed Mr. Tsarnaev during visits to the Makhachkala mosque, whose worshipers adhere to a more radical strain of Islam, and scrambled to locate him when he disappeared from sight after Mr. Plotnikov was killed in a counterterrorism raid. An official from the same unit told the newspaper Novaya Gazeta that Mr. Tsarnaev had been spotted repeatedly with a suspected militant, Mahmoud Mansur Nidal, who was killed shortly thereafter in a counterterrorism raid.
What is certain, however, is that investigators are looking into the time Mr. Tsarnaev spent with a distant cousin, Magomed Kartashov, founder of a group called Union of the Just, a religious organization that promoted civic action, not violence. Mr. Kartashov, whose relationship with Mr. Tsarnaev was first reported in Time magazine, was detained 12 days ago by the police after taking part in a wedding procession that flew Islamic flags.
(At a checkpoint, police officers stopped the procession and demanded that the flags be removed; Mr. Kartashov protested, and is now facing charges of resisting the police.)
Agents from Russia's Federal Security Service visited Mr. Kartashov last Sunday in a detention center to question him about his relationship with Mr. Tsarnaev, focusing on whether the two had shared "extremist" beliefs, said Mr. Kartashov's lawyer, Patimat Abdullayeva.
Ms. Abdullayeva said that her client had discussed religious matters with Mr. Tsarnaev, but had been a moderating influence. "Magomed is a preacher, he has nothing to do with extremism," she said.
As head of the Union of the Just, Mr. Kartashov has led demonstrations protesting police counterterrorism tactics, which are often brutal here, and calling for the establishment of Islamic law, or Shariah, in the region. At a rally in February, he aligned himself with antigovernment forces in Syria, saying, "We do not want secularism, we do not want democracy, we want the law of Allah," according to the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
Andrew Roth contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 9, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated in one instance the surname of the Boston bombing suspect whose 2012 visit to Russia is under investigation. He is Tamerlan Tsarnaev, not Tsarnae.
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