Boston bombing suspect's remains claimed The body of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev will be released to his family. A FUNERAL home has claimed the body of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a gunbattle with police after an intense manhunt. Department of Public Safety spokesman Terrel Harris said on Thursday a funeral home retained by Tsarnaev's family had picked up the 26-year-old's remains. Authorities are now closer to being able to make public Tsarnaev's cause of death. The medical examiner determined Tsarnaev's cause of death on Monday, but officials said it wouldn't be disclosed until his remains were released and a death certificate was filed. Tsarnaev's widow, Katherine Russell, who has been living with her parents in Rhode Island, learned this week that the medical examiner was ready to release his body and wanted it turned over to his side of the family, her lawyer Amato DeLuca said days ago. Tsarnaev's uncle Ruslan Tsarni, of Maryland, said on Tuesday night the family would take the body. After a hearse believed to be carrying Tsarnaev's body departed Boston, television stations reported that their helicopters followed it to the Dyer-Lake Funeral Home in North Attleboro. About 20 protesters gathered outside the funeral home. An Associated Press photographer later saw a hearse leaving the home escorted by two police cars. Dyer-Lake funeral director Tim Nye told The Sun-Chronicle newspaper late on Thursday that the body was only brought to his funeral home temporarily and was transported to another facility, but he didn't say where. "He is not at our funeral home and we won't be handling final arrangements," Nye said. 1, died three days after the bombing. The April 15 bombing, using pressure cookers packed with explosives, nails, ball bearings and metal shards near the marathon's finish line, killed three people and injured more than 260 others. Authorities said Tsarnaev and his younger brother later killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer and carjacked a driver, who later escaped. Authorities said that during the gunbattle with police, the Tsarnaev brothers, ethnic Chechens from Russia who came to the United States about a decade ago, set off another pressure cooker bomb and tossed grenades before the older brother ran out of ammunition. They said the younger brother ran over his brother's body as he drove away from the scene to escape. Three of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's friends, college classmates, were arrested on Wednesday and accused of helping after the marathon bombing to remove a laptop and backpack from his dormitory room before the FBI searched it. A top Republican senator on Thursday asked President Barack Obama's administration to explain how one of the students entered the United States without a valid student visa. Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, in a three-page letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, asked for additional details about the student visa applications for Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, college roommates from Kazakhstan charged with obstruction of justice in the marathon bombing case, and how Tazhayakov was allowed to re-enter the United States in January. Tazhayakov was a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth when he left the US in December. Peter Boogaard, a DHS spokesman, said on Wednesday that when Tazhayakov arrived in January Customs and Border Protection had not been alerted that he was no longer a student. Boogaard said the department was working on a fix to the student visa system.