Index – Abroad – Wanted to join the government, killing 19 kindergarten children and 149 more

Twenty-five years ago, on April 19, 1995, at 9:02 a.m. local time, a massive explosion shook downtown Oklahoma City, including the area around the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Television helicopters arriving at the scene at lightning speed saw traces of mass destruction, with half a third of the building essentially destroyed in the blast, killing 168 people, including 19 preschool-age children, and injuring more than 680 people.

The explosion was planned by a former soldier, Timothy McVeigh, a believer in white superiority who later turned against the government’s institutional system, which did not accidentally target the building: several federal offices were there, including the Social Security Office, Housing and Urban Development office, the Secret Service, the Veterinary Office, the Office of Trade in Alcohol and Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the Office against Drugs (DEA). The building housed some 550 government officials and federal employees, but there was also a daycare center for preschool-age children.

The focal point of a non-appearance at trial was

To understand the motivation of the substantive author of the terrorist attack, Timothy McVeigh, we must go back to the 1980s and the spread of anti-government and white supremacist movements that are gaining momentum.

One of the main centers of the movement was the state of Idaho, which was inhabited primarily by whites and inhabited by isolated areas, including the Aryan nation’s far-right anti-Semitic group, which proclaimed white supremacy. One of founder Richard Butler’s main teachings was that the American government is in the hands and control of the Jews, and this can only be changed by opening space for white Christian sovereignty. Especially in a world where the largest American cities have lost their white majority.

In this decade, several racist organizations have recruited their members saying that the white race is a minority in the United States, it needs rescue, and that this requires radical action. Several former members of the Aryan Nation also formed smaller but more violent groups that caught the attention of the FBI.

Thus, as they watched the Aryan nation, they caught the eye of Randy Weaver, a former elite green-cap formation who lived with his family in northern Idaho, on the hillside of Ruby Ridge, isolated from a corrupt civilization ( he and his wife said), but sometimes he visited demonstrations of the Aryan nation. , where he quickly began to sympathize with anti-government views as well.

At one of those meetings, an FBI informant integrated into the Aryan Nation approached him with a request to cut the barrels of two shotguns for him, turning them into illegal weapons. Weaver did so, and the FBI, taking advantage of the rape, immediately tried to recruit him as an informant. He immediately refused, but when the designated trial day for the rifles case did not appear, an arrest warrant was issued against him.

Instead of being captured, members of the US Marshal Service. USA They watched the Weavers for a time to avoid an armed confrontation with the man, who was known to have multiple rifles at home. But a Weaver family dog ​​sniffed one of the reconnaissance units, and a son of the Weavers, a 14-year-old quarterback, died in the resulting shooting, and the dog was destroyed. The following day, the shooting continued, and a sniper accidentally killed Weaver’s wife, Vicki, who she thought was a gunman. The siege lasted another 10 days, at the end of which only with civilian help could Randy Weaver, his three children and family friend Kevin Harris resign.

Weaver was eventually brought to justice and given 18 months for failing to appear on the original trial date; He was charged with all charges related to the armed incident. He was on trial in 1993 when the Waco tragedy in Texas took place.

The seriousness of what happened at Ruby Ridge is demonstrated by the subsequent demotion of a second FBI man, the suspension of three agents in the case, his imprisonment, and the Weavers who sued the state for $ 3.1 million in compensation.

Both Ruby Ridge and Waco were blamed by the federal government’s armed forces for capturing an isolated radical man, leading to armed conflict and the deaths of civilians.

The confused soldier who found the enemy in the government

Even after Ruby Ridge, but after the Waco incident, weapons and religion finally became the two cornerstones of organizations promoting white supremacy, with which they waged the fight against the state. Timothy McVeigh, born in 1968 in New York State, joined this war quite early.

McVeigh enlisted as a soldier at the age of 20, but his racist behavior was also noted during his military service in Georgia. He was once reprimanded for buying a T-shirt labeled White Power at a Ku Klux Klan rally, and then quickly spread after his appointment as a sergeant, preferring to give low-rank jobs to black soldiers in his unit and deal with them with tokens. racist. In this case, however, they failed to take action against a young officer who was exceptionally well-directed with a machine gun and received extensive training in army explosives, which was first transferred to Kansas and then sent to the Middle East in 1991 during Operation Storm of the desert.

He experienced much of the horrors of war in celebration of ecstasy, but in the devastation it caused, he realized that the American government had become a stalker, an aggressor in a foreign conflict, in parallel with school abuse. of his childhood against the government. translated. He was willing to leave this in the background for a short time, when he was ordered to return home from the Gulf War in a special army unit, he soon fell off the harvester. It was then dismantled almost immediately with honors in 1991.

Upon leaving the military, he came up with increasingly confusing conspiracy theories haunted by unemployment. He was disappointed that he couldn’t find a job despite his military service, and he sacredly believed that a microchip had been planted at his army base so that they could track him down, only deepening his anti-government views at the time. . Their worsening situation was also not helped by the fact that they informed him that he had received an overpayment of $ 1,058 during his military service, so they were waiting for the return of the money. As he had accumulated serious debts by this time with gambling, in his despair he turned permanently against the government.

He viewed the Ruby Ridge case in 1992 as a murder of civilians, and in the spring of 1993 he was already actively campaigning against the government institutional system to visit Waco during the siege to show solidarity with the Davidists trapped in the Mount Center Carmel. That he was there was not just a legend: He even made a statement to one of the television companies while taking a break while handing out anti-government pamphlets.

The state became an increasingly threatening enemy.

McVeigh, who is also very interested in the Ruby Ridge case, interpreted what happened in Waco as a clear message, seeing what the state can do to take people’s weapons and bring citizens with gun rights to the Justice. Images of the Waco case itself angered Americans, and far-right organizations were making even more publicity by producing videos interwoven with conspiracy theories, blaming the government’s military for the senseless destruction.

When the flames erupted in Waco on April 19, 1993, McVeigh was pulling himself from a friend’s farm in Michigan. He aroused great anger at what he saw on television, and this was only exacerbated when the Bill Clinton government passed a law in 1993 prohibiting machine guns known as Brady Bill, which had been found by masses in Waco, and have been a regular feature of massacres since then.

McVeigh not only saw this this way, in addition to their private action, the combined influence of Waco and Brady Bill grew as similar armed militias across the country, proclaiming excessive governmental power and influence in everyday life. McVeigh did not intervene, but shared his views, constantly fearing that federal agents would confiscate his apartment or houses from what he thought were innocent civilians to confiscate his weapons.

He saw no other solution

As I pondered this, the idea that I could only notice the state with a terrorist attack grew more acute. His determination was reinforced by a book read almost like a bible, the anti-government work of the neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic William Luther Pierce, The Turner Diaries, in which he even received ready-made advice for bomb building.

However, it was also clear that whatever the final plan was, he could not carry it out alone, so he turned to two well-known army comrades who shared his anti-government views, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier. Triple started to accumulate endless fertilizer, which is a popular raw material for home pumps due to its ammonium nitrate content. But to make the explosive even stronger, McVeigh and Nichols also broke into a mine and stole a drug called Tovex, which was used for mine blasts similarly to TNT. Additionally, McVeigh obtained three huge barrels of nitromethane from somewhere, also known as fuel for racing and model cars.

He also returned to the Waco ruins during design, and after much deliberation, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was targeted, primarily because one of the ATF headquarters that launched the Siege of Waco was here. , in addition to the federal offices mentioned above.

Meanwhile, Fortier realized that there would be many civilian casualties in the blast, so he turned his back on McVeigh and Nichols, who were determined to continue planning the bomb that would kill as many lives as possible. McVeigh finally told Nichols on Easter Sunday, April 16, 1995, that the time had come and that they would explode on Waco’s anniversary three days later. Heading to Oklahoma City, they also rented a truck for a subsequent explosion.

One mattered, the more victims there were

McVeigh and Nichols assembled the pump in a rented truck on April 18, in an abandoned wooded area, although, like Fortier, Nichols began to become insecure. McVeigh threatened that if he didn’t help him, he would execute him and his family, so in the end, with the help of Nichols, he made the huge explosive device. Nichols, however, did not want to participate in the explosion, so the next day McVeigh drove south only to Oklahoma City with the truck loaded with bombs.

At 8.57 on Wednesday morning, he parked in a designated cargo area in front of the building, lit the wick, and then left.

Among the ruins of a torn building due to the detonation of 2.2 tons of explosives, 168 people lost their lives, including 19 preschool children who were playing in the kindergarten. More than 680 people were injured, most of them suffering permanent damage and truncation.

At first, no one knew exactly what had happened, it was only clear that a bomb could have exploded when detectives who arrived on the scene found a pool-sized hole in the parking lot, a bomb funnel in front of the smashed building.

Rescuers saw unspeakable destruction, not only among the partially destroyed building, but also between the torn levels among the remaining ruins. The rescue was hampered by the fact that many people were trapped under the rubble, the limbs of dozens of people were severed by pieces of the building that destroyed it as rubble. Furthermore, at the beginning of the rescue, panic erupted when it was thought that a second explosive device had also been found, but it turned out that it was just a demonstration piece that emerged from the ruins of the building and was used by one of the federal offices during the training.

An unprecedented disc search has begun

The search for vehicles to catch the perpetrator began hours after the explosion, including during rescue work. The power of the detonation, the large number of victims and injuries, and the fact that an attack occurred against a government building led to one of the largest investigations of the time in terms of mobilization. All government agencies were working to discover the perpetrator or perpetrators, but there were other reasons for the enormous resources available.

Then it became clear that Waco could have more to do with the explosion than the Middle East.

Among the ruins, the rear axle of the truck used for the blasting was soon found, with an identification number. From here, they reached the Ryder company, where McVeigh rented it. Although he provided false information from a forged license, with the help of eyewitnesses, he quickly had a ghost image of McVeigh and Nichols. These were displayed at the motel’s location in Junction City, Kansas, and a receptionist recognized the images.

Much to the FBI’s surprise, McVeigh (perhaps due to a momentary shake-up) signed the documents on his own behalf. The name struck at lightning speed in the criminal database: On April 19, less than 1.5 hours after the attack, a man by that name was arrested in Kansas while driving away from Oklahoma City in a car. Unlicensed. Because the bulge under his coat looked suspiciously like a gun, the police officer who arrested him acted quickly and arrested McVeigh, who admitted he was carrying a gun. There were no serious suspicions against him, but he was still sitting in his cell when FBI agents appeared to question him.

It was considered revenge

Therefore, with luck, the author was present almost immediately. When the FBI was already certain that McVeigh was their man, they wanted to move to a safer location, but the press was assigned a specific date for the transfer date so that the country could see the author of the US terrorist attack more serious outside the building. The fact that it was no longer just a ghost image,

Timothy McVeigh in the ring of federal agents during his transfer after his capture

Photo: Gregory Smith / Getty Images Hungary

He is not an Islamist fanatic, he is not a faceless organization, but a white American message of war on America. After McVeigh’s capture, President Clinton hastily stressed that neither he nor the Justice Department had provided any information to suggest a foreign perpetrator behind the attack, only the press claimed.

After the arrest, the case was explored at lightning speed. Dozens of pieces of evidence were found at Nichols’ Kansas home, which eventually led investigators to Fortier as well.

McVeigh’s trial began almost two years after the attack, on April 24, 1997. Fortier’s testimony, along with the evidence, made the prosecution’s job much easier against McVeigh, who chose a strange defense, who He claimed he had no choice but to attack the government, only to prevent Ruby Ridge and Waco. The cases are repeated.

It was not me who established the rules for this conflict, but the aggressor with his brutal and unbridled action. Women and children were killed at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Someone had to show the government what they did. I wanted to hurt them just as much as the people in Waco and Ruby Ridge

Said.

Think of these people as Star Wars assault squads. They may be innocent one by one, but they are all sinners because they work for an evil empire

McVeigh testified about the deaths of the victims, who believed that a war did not start with their bombardment, only a counterattack in the war that the United States government had begun.

On June 2, after a 23-hour deliberation, the jury found McVeigh, sentenced to death, guilty of 11 charges. The Oklahoma terrorist was executed on June 11, 2001 in an Indian prison with an injection of poison, the first execution in 38 years after a federal decision. The execution was followed live by more than 200 survivors and relatives of the victims.

McVeigh died the way he had been convicted of: not saying a word, quietly, calmly.

In two separate trials, Terry Nichols received a life sentence once and a 161 regular life sentence once, 160 for the termination of life of non-federal agents and unborn fetuses. Michael Fortier was sentenced to a lesser sentence due to his testimony and minor role in the explosion, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but was released in 2006 after 10.5 years and was later given a new identity under the protection program. of witnesses.

The ruins of the Alfred P. Murrah building were completely demolished in 1995 and are replaced by a monument honoring the victims. Only the underground garage below the building, which survived the explosion and is still in use today, recalls the original building.

According to a 2018 report by a law enforcement organization called the Southern Poverty Law Center in the United States, there are more than 500 armed groups and militias promoting white superiority in the United States, half of the known hate groups.

Source: Oklahoma City (documentary, 2017)

(Cover image: Ruin of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City after the April 19, 1995 terrorist attack. Photo: Bob Daemmrich / AFP)