US:Thirty eight years on and justice may at last be closing a chapter in Birmingham, Alabama, writes Patrick Smyth, Washington Correspondent.
The bombing in September, 1963, of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church left four young girls dead, their bloodied white Sunday dresses perhaps more shocking than any other single image from the many outrgages committed against blacks in the civil rights era.
The girls were simply waiting in the basement for the beginning of a Sunday youth service in a church that had become an important meeting place for advocates of public school desegregation in this bitterly-divided town. Ten sticks of dynamite hurled by members of a local branch of the Ku Klux Klan brought the building down on top of them.
On Thursday an Alabama court ruled that the last of three suspected bombers, 72-year-old Bobby Frank Cherry, is now competent to stand trial for the killings. Jefferson County Circuit Judge James Garrett said Mr Cherry had been "restored to competency" after confinement in a state mental hospital, overturning a July ruling that he was not fit to assist in his own defence.
Mr Cherry is charged with four counts of murder in respect of the deaths of Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins (all 14), and Denise McNair (11). If his trial proceeds, Mr Cherry, who maintains his innocence, will become the third Klan member to be tried for the bombing.
Another ex-Klansman, Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss, was convicted of murder in the bombing in 1977 and died in prison. Thomas Blanton Jnr was convicted in the bombing last year and sentenced to life in prison, and a fourth suspect, Mr Herman Cash, died in 1994 without being charged. Blanton, who continues to maintain his innocence, is appealing his conviction.
"We are very pleased," the US Attorney, Mr Doug Jones, lead prosecutor in the case, told reporters in Birmingham shortly after the ruling. "This is what should have happened in the summer." Prosecutors have been claiming that Mr Cherry has been faking mental illness. A colleague, Mr Robert Posey, said some of the same witnesses, church members and victims' relatives who testified at Blanton's trial, will testify at Mr Cherry's.
One of those may well be his son, Mr Tom Cherry, who is reported to have contributed to the grand jury indictment with evidence casting doubt on his father's alibi.
Their growing alienation is the subject of a new TV dramatisation, Sins of the Father, by all accounts a moving exploration of the son's growing realisation and attempts to cope with his father's violent and racist past.
Although he is not convinced of his father's guilt, he tells the grand jury: "Those four little girls, that's what hate gets you. And I can't do that no more, see? If he dies or goes to jail because of what I'm saying now, so be it. This has gotta stop. This has just gotta stop. And it's stopping here." Bobby Cherry was a member of an eastern Birmingham klavern (Klan branch) in the early 1960s blamed for much of the city's racial violence. From early after the killings he was already a suspect but the investigation was suspended until the mid-1990s by the then head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who maintained a local jury would never convict the Klansmen. The case was reactivated by the local FBI in 1993.