BOSTON — Authorities have obtained clear images of the faces of two men with backpacks who they believe were acting suspiciously around the time of the Boston Marathon bombings, a potential breakthrough in the search to find who planted the deadly devices, sources familiar with the investigation said Wednesday.
A department store surveillance camera caught an image of at least one of the men leaving a backpack near the finish line, a federal law enforcement official said.
Another official briefed on the investigation said the image that shows two men is the first indication that more than one bomber may have been responsible for the attacks that killed three people and injured more than 170 at Monday's race.
The men were singled out because of their demeanor and the way in which they reacted to the bomb blasts, said these officials, who could not be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly. Neither would say how close authorities were to identifying the two.
The photographic evidence adds to physical evidence already gathered at the scene, including parts of a pressure cooker probably used in the two bombs that went off as hundreds of runners were still streaming in five hours into the race.
Authorities are relying not only on extensive surveillance video but a flood of photos and videos sent in by spectators, office workers and others who were at the disaster scene near Copley Square.
"I think that this will go down in U.S. history as the most videotaped bombing in history," said Tom Thurman, who formerly headed the FBI's Bomb Data Center and helped investigate the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
On Thursday, President Obama was scheduled to speak at an interfaith service here for the victims, 59 of whom are still hospitalized, with 10 in critical condition. The third victim killed has been identified as Lu Lingzi, 23, a Chinese national who was a Boston University graduate student in statistics.
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