http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=542&ncid=693&e=7&u=/ap/20050414/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/oklahoma_city_nicholsFBI Waited to Check Out Tip on Nichols
WASHINGTON - The FBI initially dismissed a tip that convicted bomber Terry Nichols had hidden explosives and they might be used for an attack this month coinciding with the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.
While the FBI has found no evidence supporting the idea that an attack is in the works for the April 19 tenth anniversary, the information that explosives had been hidden in Nichols' former home in Herington, Kan., turned out to be true.
The tip came from imprisoned mobster Gregory Scarpa Jr., 53, a law enforcement official said this week. Scarpa is an inmate in the same maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colo., where Nichols is serving life sentences for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred Murrah federal building that killed 168 people. Timothy McVeigh was convicted of federal conspiracy and murder charges in the bombing and executed in 2001.
Scarpa learned about the explosives from Nichols, mainly through notes passed between them, said Stephen Dresch, a Michigan man who is Scarpa's informal advocate.
http://hometown.aol.com/missiletwa800/part10.htm
October 14, 1998 New York Times
An admitted Mafia member testified at his murder trial Tuesday that while in jail he spied for the government on four other inmates -- the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing and three others eventually convicted of terrorist acts -- and reported their plans for further acts to the authorities. The defendant, Gregory Scarpa Jr., testified in federal District Court in Brooklyn that, using a tiny "spy camera" that a jail official had given him, he worked undercover for the FBI for about a year in 1996 and 1997 after gaining the confidence of the others while all of them were being held in a high-security area of a federal jail in Manhattan. At the time, Scarpa was awaiting his current trial on charges that include participation in five gangland murders, racketeering and other charges. The four other inmates, including Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was convicted in November 1997 as the chief plotter of the World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people, were either being tried or were awaiting trial. The three others were convicted with Yousef, one in the 1993 Trade Center bombing and two in an aborted plot to blow up American airliners in the Far East. Scarpa said he told the FBI that associates of the four men planned to kill a prosecutor in one of Yousef's trials, attack a federal judge whom Scarpa did not identify, and attack "government installations" that he did not specify. Among the things he photographed, he said, were notes he received from Yousef, who Scarpa said wanted the notes returned, and "timing devices." He did not explain what those devices were or how the inmates managed to obtain them in the jail, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan. The U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan, which prosecuted Yousef and the others, the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn, which is prosecuting Scarpa, and the FBI all declined to comment on his testimony. .... Scarpa, 47, also told the jury that he had passed on information from the inmates that other terrorists "were on their way" to the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta to check out the security for a possible bomb attack there, but his testimony did not indicate that they were responsible for the bomb that did explode there, killing one person. Federal authorities have most recently linked that bombing to a fugitive they are seeking, Eric Robert Rudolph.
FBI finds explosives in Nichols home
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/04/01/nichols.house.search.ap/
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Tipped they may have missed evidence a decade ago, FBI agents searched the former home of convicted Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols and found blasting caps and other explosive materials apparently related to the 1995 attack, officials said Friday.
FBI officials said the material was found buried in a crawl space of the house in Herington, Kansas, which wasn't checked by agents during the numerous searches of the property during the original investigation of Nichols and Timothy McVeigh.
"The information so far indicates the items have been there since prior to the Oklahoma City bombing," Agent Gary Johnson said in a telephone interview from Oklahoma City.
FBI spokesman Jeff Lanza said in Kansas the materials were found in boxes, much of them wrapped in plastic, and were being sent to the FBI lab for analysis. The FBI is operating on the assumption the evidence was from the original Oklahoma plot, he said.
Victim wanted death penalty in Rudolph case
http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050410/NEWS01/50409015/1001
It sounds like a page-turning fiction novel. A nurse walks into work one day and wakes up two weeks later the victim of a fatal bombing.
But it’s reality to Alabama nurse Emily Lyons, a survivor of the 1998 abortion clinic bombing that killed police officer Robert “Sande” Sanderson.
And as Eric Robert Rudolph agreed to plea guilty on Friday to that bombing and to another in Atlanta, another chapter in Lyon’s life came to a close.
The couple had hoped for the death penalty, but they were approached several weeks ago and asked if they would instead approve of four life sentences. The trade-off would be information on where Rudolph had hidden 250 pounds of dynamite.
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