(Image source from: Was releasing Boston bombers images the right thing to do?})

As Federal law enforcement officials ponder if it was right to release photos of Boston Marathon bombing suspects that led to the arrest of one of the bombers, Stephanie Douglas, executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Division, asserted in an interview on Sunday that releasing images of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the bombers, was the right thing to do even though it led to the death of an an MIT police officer.

Bombers Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, killed officer Sean Collier while on the run.

Douglas said law enforcement “really had no choice” but to release the photos.

“Believe me, the death of Sean Collier is not lost on the FBI,” she said. “But I think at the end of the day, given the facts as we knew them at the time, we made the best decision.”

An argument against releasing the photos by security cameras along the route of the race was that they could have provided an incentive for the still unidentified suspects to escape, Douglas said.

Rick Deslauriers, the agent in charge of the Boston FBI office, said his wife told him that she believed that it were the bombers who killed Collier.

“I did not believe that she had cracked the case at the time,” Deslauriers said.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev died following the shootout with police several days after the April 15 marathon.

His brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was wounded, but escaped and was later found hiding in a boat parked in a yard in a Boston suburb and was taken into custody.

AW:Suchorita Choudhury