THE MAN accused of the Oklahoma City bombing was found guilty in Denver, Colorado, yesterday of all 11 charges against him. The jury will begin discussing the option of the death penalty tomorrow. A decision on sentencing could take up to two weeks.
US District Judge Richard Matsch read the jury verdict of guilty of all 11 counts against Timothy J. McVeigh in the truck bombing of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19th, 1995. Each of the 11 counts carries a capital charge.
"We accept your verdict, you have done your duty," Judge Matsch told the jury of seven men and five women.
McVeigh, hands clasped in front, watched the jury as it walked into the courtroom and the judge as he read its verdict. He showed no emotion. Three US Marshals sat behind him.
There were sporadic bursts of cheering outside the courtroom as the verdicts were announced. The New York Stock Exchange adjourned while the verdicts were being read.
There are 160 other state counts of murder against McVeigh for which the Attorney General of Oklahoma says he will be tried.
The 11 murder counts of which McVeigh was found guilty are for the deaths of US government agents and the use of a 4,000 lb ammonianitrate fuel bomb which destroyed the federal building.
A single man and a decorated soldier of the Gulf War who left the US army because he was not accepted by the Green Berets - a commando force for which he had volunteered - he then turned against the government ostensibly because of the killings of religious cultists at Waco, Texas. It is believed that McVeigh is of Irish descent.
The bomb that killed at least 168 people and wounded over 500 reduced the landmark federal building to a heap of rubble. No eyewitness placed McVeigh in Oklahoma City on the morning of the bombing.
The chief, though uncooperative, witness against him was his young sister, Jennifer, who testified unwillingly that her brother told her Something big is going to happen," which later she linked with the bombing. When members of the FBI were allegedly harassing her to give evidence, McVeigh sent them a note via his sister calling them "a bunch of cowardly bastards" - That, too, was used in evidence against him.
Among the dead were 19 children. A former pathologist in Northern Ireland, Dr Thomas K. Marshall, who said he had examined some 300 explosions in Northern Ireland, which made him easily the most experienced witness at the trial, suggested that a mystery leg found in the rubble might have belonged to the bomber.
In Northern Ireland a lone limb usually suggested that it was part of a body nearby that had been obliterated in the detonation.
This matter was not pursued as much as it might have been. For one thing, it changes the number of dead to 169, although the 169th person has not been identified. If it belonged to the bomber, then McVeigh was not the bomber in the strict sense of the term, although legally he was part of the conspiracy.
Dr Frederic Whitehurst, a scientist who has been critical of the FBI laboratory in Washington for the careless manner in which it handles material, was called by the defence.
Mr Lance Fortier, a friend of McVeigh, testified against him, as did his wife, who made a plea bargain with the government.
The star witness for the defence changed her testimony last Friday. Ms Daina Bradley, a bombing victim whose two children and mother were killed in the blast, and who lost her right leg, changed the testimony she had been giving for two years.
Looking out from the Social Security Office on the first floor of the Murrah building just before the bombing, she claimed she saw a swarthy man get out of a Ryder truck. On Friday, she said she saw two men - one light complexioned. She said she had been treated for mental illness and her memory was poor.