Congress may reopen the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing after allegations by one of the two convicted plotters about the involvement of a third man.
Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001 for killing 168 when he detonated a lorry-load of explosives outside a government building, reportedly out of hatred for the US federal authorities.
Another disgruntled army veteran, Terry Nichols, is serving a life sentence in Colorado for helping him carry out the attack in 1995.
But rumours of a broader conspiracy have continued to circulate around the US’ second most lethal terrorist attack, despite the FBI’s conclusion that only McVeigh and Nichols were involved.
After 10 years of silence, Nichols claims to have undergone a religious enlightenment and has told a woman he befriended, Kathy Sanders, who lost two grandchildren in the bombing, that he could tell her details about the plot that were being suppressed by the government.
In a letter from prison, published in The Los Angeles Times, he claimed that Roger Moore, an Arkansas gun collector, had given McVeigh sophisticated chemical explosives and supplied other bomb components found recently in Nichols’ old home in Kansas.
Moore did not respond to the report on Wednesday and his whereabouts are unknown.
Ms Sanders, whose grandsons were at a nursery in the targeted building, said she had asked to visit Nichols in his high-security prison to talk about the allegations in the letters he had sent her.
”I hope to go see him,” said Sanders, who has written a book about her efforts to investigate the attack.
”I just haven’t got the prison to approve it, even though I met all the criteria. They said I was a security risk, although I don’t know why I’d be a security risk, unless it was the speeding ticket I got about 20 years ago.”
A California congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, who is contemplating whether to launch a new public inquiry into the case, has said he also wants to talk to Nichols. On Wednesday a spokesperson for Rohrabacher said: ”He is waiting on a request to meet Terry Nichols and talk to him, and then will make a decision based on that.”
The congressman recently declared in the House of Representatives: ”That this mass murder of Americans was accomplished by two disgruntled veterans acting alone seems to be the conclusion reached by those in authority. However, there are some unsettling loose ends and unanswered questions.”
On April 18, the day before the 10th anniversary of the bombing, Nichols wrote to Sanders claiming that the government knew other people had been involved. He said he wanted to ”to help expose the government cover-up in my case and thus reveal the truth in the OKC bombing”.
He claimed that Moore had given McVeigh binary explosives. The gun collector, who knew McVeigh and sometimes allowed him to stay at his Arkansas home, has previously denied all involvement in the conspiracy, and was never charged. He claimed that he had been robbed of guns worth $60 000 by a masked man before the bombing. McVeigh sold the weapons to help fund the attack.
In his letter, Nichols hinted that other plotters were also involved in the bombing on April 19 1995 of the Alfred P Murrah federal building, whose victims included 19 children among the dead, and 500 other people injured.
”There’s much more I would like to say,” Nichols wrote. ”Please pray that the truth finally comes out.” – Guardian Unlimited Â