On April 19, 1995, a bomb was set off on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The domestic terrorist truck bombing carried out by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols killed more than 168 people and injured more than 680 others. The bomb destroyed 324 other buildings and burned 86 cars. The estimated cost for repairs was 652 million USD. The Oklahoma City Bombing became the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in the history of the US and still remains so till this day.
Motive
McVeigh and Nichols met in 1988 in the US army. They shared interests in survivalism and expressed anger at the government's decisions regarding Randy Weaver and the Waco Siege. McVeigh decided to bomb a federal building to express his anger.
Carrying out the Bombing
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| McVeigh's Movement/Actions taken |
McVeigh originally planned to assassinate Attorney General Janet Reno, Lon Horiuchi, and a few others (and after the bombing, he had admitted that he had wished he had done that instead). He planned the location to be somewhere in Missouri, Arizona, Texas, or Arkansas. He claimed that he wanted to minimize non-government related casualties, so he ruled out Arkansas. In December, McVeigh visited Oklahoma City to confirm his target: the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. This building housed fourteen federal agencies and McVeigh also chose it because the building had a glass front which he expected to shatter and absorb and dissipate some of the force to protect nearby occupants who were not government affiliated. The attack was planned to take place on April 19th which was the 2nd anniversary of the Waco Siege and the 220th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. McVeigh and Nichols stole material needed for the bomb and stored them in sheds that they rented.
Investigations
Initially, the FBI and US citizens hypothesized that the bombing was carried out by international terrorists, specially Arab terrorists. McVeigh was arrested 90 minutes within the bombing when he was driving away without a license plate and for concealing a gun in the vehicle. The police man who had arrested McVeigh was Charlie Hanger. Upon putting him in jail, he found a business card that McVeigh was attempting to hide. The back of the business card had the words, "TNT at $5 a stick. Need more" which was later used as evidence in court. Eventually pieces matched up, and McVeigh was found guilty of the bombing and Nichols was found guilty of assisting him.
McVeigh received the death penalty where he died of lethal injection and Nichols was sentenced to life in jail.
1 comment:
Very informative post. It's interesting how the US would never consider that an insider, not a minority, would commit such an act. To this day, are soldiers still mad at the government or is it less than it was then?
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