Welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. Today I'm taking you

to the quiet, quaint, tight-knit community of Watertown, Massachusetts. It sits just outside

Boston on the banks of the Charles River, and the locals say it's the perfect place to

raise a family. But on the 19th of April 2013, it was where a terrorist manhunt took place.

This was about 12, 15 in the morning. Everybody's asleep. It's usually a very quiet time for our

officers, and now a gunfight starts on this back street. That's Edward DeVoe, Watertown's chief

of police, who let the hunt. It was just us to play out, get me a shot at, and they had through

some pipe bombs down the street. One one exploded, blew out the windows in John's car. Another one

didn't detonate was right in the middle of street where they were. At the meantime, my officer

calls me at home, wakes me up and says, Chief, you have a situation there shooting at our officers

and throwing bombs at them. Joe is yelling at the radio, shot fired, shot fired. This is the

first time, and still the only time in the United States, that police officers have been shot at,

it had bombs thrown at them at the same time. And here it is in this little bedroom community in

Watertown. The officers didn't know it at the time, but they were engaged in a gunfight with

Tamalan and Jo Hazaniyev. Two domestic terrorists, who four days before this, had let off

explosives at the Boston Marathon, and killed three people.

So the Boston Marathon is on the third Monday in April. It's the beginning of the spring.

It's a very festive weekend. It's my favorite weekend of the year, and it is for a lot of people.

A critical incident just died to play out at one of our best events in the past. We do that.

I think everybody felt like it was like a punch in the stomach that here it is a great race,

it now, it's a tragedy. And what kind of information were you being given about who'd committed the

crime? We really weren't, you know, where we were saying to each other was it looks like this is

...