Roger Franklin: Claims link bombing to Baghdad

NEW YORK - For the first time since the Alfred Murrah Building came down in Oklahoma City in 1995, the recent anniversary of the bombing that killed 168 people passed largely unnoticed in America.

There were ceremonies, but the echo was hard to hear above the sound of Baghdad's toppling statues. A nation savouring its triumph had little time for an incident that remains an enigma.

According to investigators, the case was closed when Timothy McVeigh expired in silence in the execution chamber.

He was a wacko, the authorised version insists, a right-wing loner determined to avenge the 1993 federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, that killed some 90 cultists. Oklahoma's loose ends have all been tied up, officials say, time to move on.

Except in an Oklahoma courtroom, where the families of the dead beg to differ. On April 24, lawyers representing 24 families of the dead attempted to persuade a judge that McVeigh and his partner, Terry Nichols, were part of a bigger plot.

The lawyers claim the skein of tangled threads leads all the way to Iraq. Even, perhaps, to September 11.

Judge Deborah Robinson gave the legal team time to bolster its argument that McVeigh was working for Saddam Hussein. Yes, she said, a series of remarkable coincidences all point to Baghdad, but she couldn't begin to consider billions of dollars in damages on the strength of circumstantial conjecture. Come back in a month's time, she said, and bring a smoking gun.

Lawyers put a brave face on the ruling. All that was missing, they said, was documentary proof. Iraqi intelligence records of the sort that are turning up almost every day.

As the attic is cleared out, we will learn more, said Thomas Fitton, whose Judicial Watch foundation filed the lawsuit.

For believers, there is enough evidence already. As they see it, the trail begins seconds before the Murrah blast, when nine witnesses reported a brown pickup truck speeding off with a man of Middle Eastern appearance at the wheel.

Police looked for it until a patrolman radioed that he had just handcuffed a young, white male after a routine traffic stop. It was McVeigh, and his arrest ended inquiries into an Iraqi connection.

Except for Jayna Davis, then an Oklahoma City TV reporter. After reaching the scene within two minutes of the blast, eight witnesses told her of that pickup's rubber-burning departure. Despite investigators' warnings that Davis was wasting her time and theirs, she kept digging.

The dossier begins with the pickup's owner, whom Jayna identified as Hussain Al-Hussaini, a former Republican Guardsman and Iraqi immigrant who owned a handyman business in Oklahoma City. She also found that Hussaini's six-man workforce, all former Iraqi soldiers, didn't come to work on the day that McVeigh hired the truck used in the bombing.

Could they have helped mix the fertiliser and diesel fuel, a task the FBI says would have taken one man working alone several days?

At the motel where McVeigh had stayed, the owner added weight to the claims: Not only had he seen McVeigh entertaining Hussaini and other Middle Eastern visitors, they had all fussed with a yellow truck that dripped diesel fuel all over his parking lot.

Then there was John Doe Number Two, the mysterious co-conspirator for whom the FBI issued an all-points bulletin, only to abandon the hunt several weeks later. John Doe, they said several weeks later, was Terry Nichols, so they had stopped looking.

Davis was sceptical, not least because the Identikit picture bore only a slight resemblance to Nichols. But compared with Hussaini's mugshot, it was a near match right down to a tattoo.

Although officials derided Davis as a crank, she kept ferreting out tantalising links. Nichols was unemployed and had little money in the bank. Yet he flew several times to the Philippines, where he stayed in the same hotel as Ramzi Youssef.

Who is Youssef? The convicted mastermind behind the first attempt to destroy New York's World Trade Centre in 1993.

He just happens to be the nephew of Khalid Mohammed, the recently arrested head of al Qaeda's military committee and the man who oversaw September 11's attacks. The relatives and their lawyers argue that there is one more reason the legal system should indulge their theorising.

If it were to be explored, they say, the result might unite the Oklahoma bombing, September 11 and the Bush Administration's as-yet-unproven assertions that Saddam worked hand-in-glove with Osama bin Laden.

Their final link: Shortly before Mohammed Atta flew his hijacked plane into the Twin Towers, he and a fellow terrorist visited Oklahoma. Investigators aren't sure why, nor do they know whom he saw.

But they know that of all the lodgings in the city, he chose to stay in McVeigh's old motel. Could it be that someone in Iraq, someone liaising with al Qaeda, told him the motel was previously a safe refuge?

Herald Feature: The Oklahoma bombing

Herald Feature: Iraq