A friend of Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was on Friday sentenced to three and a half years in prison for obstructing police, the BBC reports.

Azamat Tazhayakov, a Kazakh exchange student, tearfully apologized for removing a backpack containing fireworks from Tsarnaev’s room, according to the report.

He denounced Tsarnaev’s actions, which killed three and injured 264 at the finishing line of the marathon in 2013.

Last year, Tazhayakov was convicted of obstruction of justices.

Tsarnaev’s three friends went into his dormitory to collect the evidence, a backpack and a laptop.

Kadyrbayev took the lead in removing the items, texting with Tsarnaev as he did so, while the two other friends, including Tazhayakov and American Robel Phillipos, stood by and assisted, according to reports from the Boston Globe.

Kadyrbayev pleaded guilty last year to removing the backpack from Tsarnaev’s room and was sentenced on Tuesday to six years in prison.

Tsarnaev himself was sentenced to death several weeks ago by a jury which refuted the 21-year-old lawyers’ argument that he was pulled into the plot by his radicalized Muslim older brother, Tamerlan.

Tsarnaev was convicted in April of 30 counts. He was found guilty of conspiring and detonating weapons of mass destruction at a public event as an act of terrorism resulting in death.

He has confirmed that his older brother Tamerlan was behind the 2013 attack and that he “wanted to defend Islam from attack.”

Following the bombings, the FBI discovered that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout with police, had sent text messages to his mother as early as 2011 suggesting he was willing to die for Islam.

The interfaith group Americans for Peace and Tolerance said after the attack that the mosque attended by the two brothers “has a curriculum that radicalizes people.”

(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)