BOSTON: Accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told his friends about martyrdom and bomb-building over lunch before the attacks last year, an FBI agent testified on Friday in the trial of one of the friends for obstruction.

Azamat Tazhayakov is the first of Tsarnaev’s friends to face trial. He is charged with removing evidence from Tsarnaev’s room at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and throwing away a backpack containing fireworks casings as the FBI searched for the suspect, who is accused of killing three people and injuring 264 in the April 2013 bombings.

FBI Special Agent Timothy Quinn said Tazhayakov told him that Tsarnaev had discussed martyrdom and his knowledge of bomb building during a conversation over lunch with Tazhayakov and his roommate and fellow Kazakh exchange student Dias Kadyrbayev before spring break last year.

“Dzhokhar had explained that people who die in an act of martyrdom die with a smile on their face and go straight to heaven,” said Quinn, who interviewed Tazhayakov in the days after the alleged visit to Tsarnaev’s room.

Tsarnaev was captured in the days after the bombing and is awaiting trial, but his older brother Tamerlan, also a suspect in the bombing, was killed following a shoot-out with police.

Another FBI agent, Farbod Azad, testified that Tazhayakov told him he and Kadyrbayev, and a third man, Robel Phillipos of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had removed the backpack and a laptop from Tsarnaev’s dorm room.