A Kazakh friend of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been released from a U.S. federal prison after serving more than five years for obstruction of justice.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said on August 30 that 24-year-old Dias Kadyrbaev has been transferred to the custody of federal immigration officials and will be deported back to his native Kazakhstan.
Kadyrbaev and two other friends of Tsarnaev -- Azamat Tazhayakov and Robel Kidane Phillipos -- were sentenced in 2015 for removing items from Tsarnaev's dormitory room at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth after the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013.
The three removed Tsarnaev's laptop commuter and a backpack that reportedly was filled with fireworks and 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 being in Tsarnaev's dormitory room. He was released in February.
Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, killed three people and injured hundreds of others near the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev and a police officer were killed in a gun battle during a manhunt that followed the bombing.
