Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was heavily influenced by al Qaeda literature and lectures, some of which was found on his laptop, a counterterrorism expert testified at his trial on Monday.
The testimony cut to the heart one of America's most closely watched court battles, with prosecutors painting Tsarnaev as a home-grown terrorist and his defence arguing he was a mostly normal American kid who came under the influence of his radical older brother.
Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, said some of Tsarnaev's Twitter posts and parts of a note he scrawled inside a drydocked boat where he was captured several days after the deadly marathon attack resembled Islamist publications.
Awlaki was killed in a US drone strike in 2011.
Tsarnaev is accused of killing three people and injuring 264 with a pair of homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the race's crowded finish line on April 15, 2013, and with fatally shooting a police officer three days later as he and his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, tried to flee the city.
"We Muslims are one body you hurt one you hurt us all," the message read, citing what it said was aggression in Muslim lands. "I don't like killing innocent people it is forbidden in Islam, but due to said (...) it is allowed," the message read, with a word missing due to a bullet hole.
FBI computer specialist Kevin Swindon testified earlier that copies of al Qaeda's "Inspire" magazine were found on Tsarnaev's laptop, including one with an article titled: "How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom." It also included several audio files of Awlaki lectures, he said.
Defence attorney William Fick grilled Swindon in cross-examination in an attempt to point out that it was unclear where the files on Tsarnaev's computer originated, and that there was a chance that some were placed there by Tamerlan or others.
"I don't know," Swindon replied.
Separately, a poll released on Monday found that more Boston-area residents would prefer to see Tsarnaev sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole rather than death. Some 49 percent of respondents to a poll conducted for WBUR radio by MassInc Polling said they preferred a life sentence, with 38 percent wanting to see a death sentence.
The bombing killed restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, graduate student Lingzi Lu, 23, and 8-year-old Martin Richard. Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, 27, was shot dead three days later.
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