Oklahoma City Bombing: An al-Qaeda Connection?

Foreign terrorists, including al-Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef, may have played a role in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, according to an oversight investigation by the House International Relations Committee.

In his report The Oklahoma City Bombing: Was There A Foreign Connection? (.pdf), International Relations Committee chairman Dana Rohrabacher (R - California), presents evidence suggesting that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols may have been assisted in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building by "Middle Easterners" and "a German national living at an extremist compound in eastern Oklahoma."

The bomb exploded in front of the Murrah Building on April 19, 1995, killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured countless others. To date, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols remain the only persons convicted of the crime. McVeigh was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001. Nichols is now serving a life sentence in a Florence, Colorado supermax prison.

Throughout his trial and appeals, McVeigh contended the FBI had concealed evidence that he and Nichols had actually acted as part of a larger group of conspirators.

Enter al-Qaeda's Ramzi Yousef
Rohrabacher's committee presents extensive, "yet in some cases circumstantial," evidence establishing a relationship between Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef, the al-Qaeda terrorist convicted of carrying out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. "For example, of all the cities in the world, convicted terrorist Ramzi Yousef and Terry Nichols were in Cebu City in the Philippines at the same time three months before the Oklahoma City bombing." The report continues to trace the Nichols' suspicious activities and relationships in the Philippines in the years and days leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing.

As the report points out, both the Oklahoma City and the 1993 World Trade Center bombings followed similar patterns, "a rental truck loaded with ammonium-based explosives, using similar detonation devices, based on the strategy of driving a vehicle into or near a target."

Rohrabacher also finds fault with the Justice Department for both its failures in the initial investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing and for what the committee call its current "lack of willingness" to examine the many question raised in the committee's report.

Photo courtesy of FEMA

Also See:
Bush Comments on McVeigh Execution
McVeigh: FBI Concealed Bombing Evidence
Poll: US Split on FBI's McVeigh Investigation Problems
State Department Lists of State Sponsors of Terrorism (Terrorism)
U.S. Funded Jihadists in Afghanistan Before the 1979 Soviet Invasion (Terrorism)