Thursday, March 04, 2004
The Independent [UK] 01 March 2004:Oklahoma prosecutors [are] dragging Timothy McVeigh's friend and convicted accomplice, Terry Nichols, back into court today: not satisfied with the life sentence he is already serving, they want to send him to the death chamber for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.
As the trial gets under way, however, a flurry of new evidence promises to demonstrate quite the opposite of what the prosecutors are hoping to prove: that Nichols, far from being a key player in the conspiracy, was a relatively marginal figure, and that a gang of neo-Nazi bank robbers, hitherto ignored by federal and state prosecutors, had a far more prominent role.
In other words, what is intended to be an exercise in judicial "closure" for bereaved Oklahomans could end up demolishing the FBI's theory of how the worst peacetime atrocity . . .
Already, the FBI has acknowledged destroying evidence linking the bank robbers to the bombing, for reasons that have yet to be made clear. An array of colourful witnesses - including McVeigh's best friend on Death Row and the self-proclaimed ringleader of the bank robbery gang - are expected to substantiate that evidence in testimony and add details of their own. It doesn't look like this trial will be touching on the other explosives insidce the building or the Iraqi connections to McVeigh or the Abu Sayaff connections to Nichols. But the 'aryan' angle is rife wih informants and agents provacateur as well, so this could be interesting.
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