 Lawyers for accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev asserted Friday that his older brother and alleged accomplice had been encouraged by the FBI to be an informant and to report on the Chechen and Muslim community, according to court records. “We base this on information from our client’s family and other sources that the FBI made more than one visit to talk with Anzor [his father], Zubeidat [his mother] and Tamerlan, questioned Tamerlan about his Internet searches, and asked him to be an informant, reporting on the Chechen and Muslim community. Sign up for more newsletters here 
 
 The lawyers suggested that Tamerlan Tsarnaev could have misinterpreted his interactions with the FBI as pressure from the agency, and that they could have “increased his paranoia and distress.” 
 
 The defense wants to investigate those factors as it seeks to portray Tamerlan as a dominating family figure who may have pushed the younger Dzhokhar to take part in the April 15 bombings last year. The emerging picture of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed as U.S. agents tried to arrest him days after the bombings, is likely to play a key role in the upcoming defense of his brother. “Evidence that shows Tamerlan to have had a substantially longer and deeper engagement than his younger brother with extremist and violent ideology is mitigating for the light that it sheds on their relative culpability.” 
 
 Prosecutors did not immediately respond to the defense request, though defense lawyers conceded that they have a March 14, 2014, letter in which prosecutors said they had “no evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was solicited by the government to be an informant.” 
 
 Although the FBI does not comment on court matters, the bureau cited a statement Friday that it made Oct. 18, 2013, which said, “The Tsarnaev brothers were never sources for the FBI, nor did the FBI attempt to recruit them as sources.” 
 
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 Dzokhar Tsarnaev, now 20, faces a 30-count indictment in his alleged role in the bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 260. If convicted at his trial this fall, he faces a death sentence. The image of Tsarnaev as a more radicalized fighter fits with the conclusion of a House Committee on Homeland Security report last month, which said he returned to the U.S. in 2012 with a near-manic desire to strike out against the U.S., evidenced in tirades he carried out at local mosques.
– On Jan. 23, 2013, less than three months before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was ready to reinvent himself. He applied that day to change his first name to "Muaz," in honor of a rebel from Russia's Dagestan republic who was killed by Russian forces in 2009. Muaz was also the nickname bestowed upon Tsarnaev when he visited Dagestan in 2012, officials say. The previously unreleased name change application was recently obtained from the Department of Homeland Security by the Los Angeles Times. The reason Tsarnaev gave for changing his name, according to an official who spoke to the Times: "He said, 'The Russian people have been terrorizing my home country for all these years.' This is why he needed to come back to America and help." This detail, and others that are emerging, paint the elder Tsarnaev as more radical than he was originally believed to be—and defense attorneys for younger brother Dzhokhar are likely to use that picture in court, to argue that Tamerlan was the leader and coerced his brother to participate. Dzhokhar's lawyers have argued that Tamerlan may have become increasingly "distressed" after the FBI interviewed him about the trip to Dagestan, possibly believing the bureau was pressuring him "to be an informant, reporting on the Chechen and Muslim community," the Boston Globe reported last month.