A woman charged with lying to the FBI after the Boston Marathon bombings says she did nothing wrong and has no intention of returning to the United States to face trial, her mother said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Reniya Manukyan left for her native Russia in 2013 after a Boston FBI agent shot and killed her husband, Ibragim Todashev, during a sweeping investigation into associates of Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s.

“They say that she’s been lying? It’s just ridiculous,’’ Manukyan’s mother, Elena Teyer, said in a telephone interview from Russia.

A federal grand jury in Atlanta indicted Manukyan last week on charges of lying to the FBI during a terror investigation, and officials said they were seeking her arrest.

But Teyer said the bureau knows where her daughter lives and even visited her city of Volgograd last year to interview her. She refused.

Manukyan, 27, declined to comment. Teyer said Manukyan gave birth in August 2015 and is still shaken by the loss of Todashev.

Federal officials allege that Manukyan lied to FBI investigators on May 21, 2013, hours before the agent fatally shot her estranged husband in Orlando. Federal investigators said Todashev, a gym buddy of Tsarnaev’s, confessed to helping Tsarnaev kill three men in Waltham in September 2011.

The charges against Manukyan also focus on the days surrounding the Waltham murders, though the indictment does not name Todashev or mention the murders. However, Teyer confirmed that the FBI had grilled Manukyan about Todashev’s whereabouts during the murders and she insisted he had nothing to do with them.

The indictment suggests that Manukyan told authorities that Todashev had already left town when the murders occurred, when in reality, she picked him up in New York the day after the bodies were found and drove him back to Atlanta, where she lived.

“Why would she lie?’’ Teyer said. “She was not even completely understanding what’s going on.’’

On Sept. 12, 2011, the bodies of Brendan Mess, 25, once a close friend of Tsarnaev’s, Erik H. Weissman, 31, and Raphael M. Teken, 37, were found in Mess’s apartment. Their throats were cut and marijuana scattered on their bodies.

Teyer suggested that the FBI pursued charges against her daughter to pressure Todashev’s family to drop a $30 million wrongful-death claim against the bureau.

She pointed out that the United States cannot force Manukyan to return to Atlanta because the United States and Russia have no extradition treaty. Teyer said she and her two children have dual citizenship in both countries, but Manukyan returned to Russia with Todashev’s body in June 2013 and stayed because she feared for her safety.

Manukyan faces up to eight years in prison, the US attorney’s office in Atlanta said.

Hassan Shibly, chief executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Florida who is working with the Todashev family on their claim against the FBI, said he feared the charges against Manukyan are in retaliation for her criticism of the bureau.

Otherwise, he said, the bureau could have waited until Manukyan returned to the United States to charge her.

“The only thing the indictment does is effectively prohibit her from returning to America,’’ Shibly said, adding that the indictment requires a fairly low burden of proof.

The FBI declined to comment.

The bureau has also faced heated criticism for its handling of the Todashev case and for failing to disclose that the FBI agent who killed Todashev, Aaron McFarlane, had faced complaints of brutality as an Oakland, Calif., police officer.

Teyer, a Russian immigrant who came to America in 2006, joined the Army and served as a pharmacy technician, winning commendations.

But she has also garnered notoriety in Boston for supporting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at his trial in 2014.He was sentenced to death for his role in the deadly April 2013 bombings. His older brother, Tamerlan, died in a shootout with Waltham police after the bombings.

On Tuesday, Teyer questioned why authorities had not solved the Waltham murders, given that Todashev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev are dead and officials had access to their DNA.

“They have no evidence,’’ she said. “It’s basically like shaking the air. That’s all they’re doing.’’

Maria Sacchetti can be reached at maria.sacchetti@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @mariasacchetti.