FBI reviewing Todashev shooting amid family's accusations

(CBS News) The FBI is reviewing the death of Ibragim Todashev, the Chechen immigrant killed last week in Orlando, Fla., during a standoff with an FBI agent and a Massachusetts state police officer. The incident that has sparked accusations from Todashev's family that the killing was unjustified.

Thursday, Todashev's father held a news conference in Moscow and asserted that his son's death amounted to an"execution-style" killing at the hands of U.S. agents and accused the FBI of shooting his son at least six times, once in the back of his head. Todashev's wife, Reni Manukyan, also spoke out this week, questioning the FBI's explanation of the apparent shot in the head and calling for an independent review of the incident.

"It's the way how they are saying he was protecting himself, that it was self-defense from the FBI agent," she said. "I don't think it is self-defense, you would not have shot him on the top of his head. It just cannot be true."

Todashev was being questioned about his connections to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bomb suspects who once trained with Todashev at a Boston-area boxing gym. Todashev, 27, was never connected to the Boston bombing but according to sources, he confessed to a separate triple homicide allegedly committed with Tsarnaev in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2011.

The FBI has convened a shooting incident review group to conduct an investigation into whether the shooting can be justified as a reasonable use of force, CBS News' Wyatt Andrews reports.

CBS News senior correspondent John Miller, formerly a deputy director at the FBI, detailed the incident that will now go before the review board.

According to Miller, moments before the shooting, Todashev was "writing out on a pad a confession to his involvement in the triple murder" when the Massachusetts state trooper "noticed that Todashev was getting more and more agitated."

"Rather than alert the agent and tip off Todashev that they sensed something was about to happened, [the trooper] texted the agent and said, 'Be careful, I think this guy is becoming more agitated,'" Miller said.

"As the agent looked down at that text, that's when the table went over, Todashev came over the table and picked up apparently a metal broom handle or some object like that ... and charged the agent. The agent as knocked back, came up with his gun, fired two or three times. Todashev came back at him and he fired more times."

"The Massachusetts state trooper never even got his gun out because of the tight space and the crossfire," Miller added, "It would have been too dangerous."

Authorities have confirmed to CBS News that the FBI agent fired six times.

The shooting review board -- which will have representatives from the Department of Justice, and from the FBI's firearms and tactical operations teams -- will comb through that sequence of events and interview relevant witnesses. "The FBI lab will do a separate probe to see if the forensics tell the same story before it goes to the review board," Miller said Friday on "CBS This Morning."

Addressing the questions regarding reasonable use of force in the standoff that led to Todashev's death, Miller said, "I was trained in the FBI policy on use of force ... the standard is if you believe you or your partner or somebody with you is going to be the victim of either serious bodily harm or possibly death, you have the right to use deadly physical force."