A 24-year-old man who was convicted in June 2015 for concealing criminal evidence for his college friend, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was deported to his native Kazakhstan, U.S. immigration officials have confirmed.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said in a statement on November 1 that Dias Kadyrbayev "departed the U.S. by commercial airline on October 23 and was released from ICE custody on October 24 at the Almaty International Airport, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, without incident."
Kadyrbaev's arrival in Kazakhstan on October 24 was announced by the Kazakh Foreign Ministry earlier this week.
Kadyrbaev and two other friends of Tsarnaev, Azamat Tazhayakov and Robel Kidane Phillipos, were sentenced in 2015 for removing items from Tsarnaev's dorm room at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth after the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013.
Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, planted bombs that killed three people and injured hundreds of others near the finish line of the running race in the U.S. city.
Tsarnaev, 25, was sentenced to death in 2015 and is seeking a new trial.
The three acquaintances removed Tsarnaev's laptop computer and a backpack that reportedly was filled with fireworks that could have been used as evidence of bomb-making activities.
Tazhayakov, also of Kazakhstan, was convicted of obstruction of justice and sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison in 2015 following his arrest in 2013. He returned to Kazakhstan after finishing his prison sentence in 2016.
Phillipos was sentenced to three years in prison for lying to FBI investigators about having been in Tsarnaev's dorm room. He was released in February.
Tamerlan and a police officer were killed in the manhunt following the bombing.
