Boston Bombing Suspect's Body Moved to Funeral Home Familiar with Muslim Services

The body of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been moved from a funeral home in North Attleboro, Massachusetts to a funeral home in Worcester. The mortuary is familiar with Muslim services and will handle funeral arrangements for Tsarnaev, who died in a gunfight with police following an intense manhunt.

Peter Stefan, owner of the Graham Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors in Worcester, said everybody deserves a dignified burial service no matter the circumstances of their death. He expects protests to occur at the funeral for the Boston bombing suspect.

On Thursday night, several protestors appeared outside the North Attleboro funeral home after Tsarnaev's body was taken there following its release by the state medical examiner's office.

"We were requested by a family member who was an appropriate representative to obtain the body from the medical examiner's office in Boston and we did, and we brought the body here as we were requested to do and then we transferred the body last night before midnight," an official from the Dyer-Lake Funeral Home in North Attleboro said.

Authorities have yet to make public the cause of Tsarnaev's death. Officials said the information wouldn't be disclosed until the suspect's remains were released and a death certificate filed. It is unclear whether the death certificate has been filed.

Meanwhile, the surviving Boston bombing suspect, Dzhokhar  Tsarnaev, told interrogators that he and his brother initially planned to set off their pressure cooker bombs on July Fourth, according to two U.S. officials. However, when they finished assembling the bombs, they decided to carry out the attack sooner and settled on the Boston Marathon.

The U.S. government has also announced its first security change directly related to the Boston bombings. Customs officials must now verify that every arriving foreign student has a valid visa. All international students re-entering the country must prove that they have a valid student visa, according to a new order by the Homeland Security Department to border agents. In the internal memorandum, obtained by the Associated Press, this change is "effective immediately." The student visa system is also being revamped so that customs and border officials get up-to-date information on visa information.

The order comes one day after the Obama administration pronounced that a student from Kazakhstan, accused of hiding evidence for one of the Tsarnaev brothers, was allowed to return to the U.S. in January without a valid student visa. Azamat Tazhayakov's student visa had been terminated when he arrived in New York but the border agent in the airport did not have access to this information in the Homeland Security Department's Student and Exchange Visitor Information System.