Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING • 499Despite repeated announcements by Spanish authorities that thegroup has been smashed, its remaining members continue to asserttheir existence through sporadic attacks.In 1985 GRAPO was one of nine major leftist European “FightingCommunist Organizations” left espousing anarchistic leftist terrorism,but by late 1992 there were only four left, the others being theRevolutionary Organization of November 17, the RevolutionaryPeople’s Liberation Party/Front, formerly known as Dev Sol, andthe Red Army Faction, which issued a communiqué in August 1992announcing it would cease its armed struggle. Since late 1992 therehave been few reports of activity by GRAPO.OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING. On 19 April 1995 at 9:02 a.m., a5,000-pound ammonium nitrate-fuel oil bomb in a rented van explodedoutside the Alfred B. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168people and injuring 853 others, as well as destroying the building.The blast destroyed or severely damaged some 300 buildings withina 16-block radius and produced a seismic shock recorded at 3.0 onthe Richter scale by seismometers located at the University of Oklahoma.The same day, Timothy James McVeigh was arrested north ofOklahoma City on Interstate 35 near Ponca City for driving withouta rear license plate and for weapons violations. On 21 April 1995McVeigh was charged with bombing the Murrah building, and on 11May 1995 Terry Lynn Nichols was charged with the same offense.On 10 August 1995 both men were charged with the eight countsof homicide for the several law enforcement officers killed in theblast, one count of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destructionto kill people, and one count of malicious destruction of federal property.Nichols and McVeigh had gathered the bomb-making materialsand van while McVeigh alone deployed the bomb. Reports of a thirdperson involved in the attack have never been settled conclusively.Timothy McVeigh was a loner within the fringes of the right-wingpatriot movement. An avid reader of the Turner Diaries, a far-rightnovel about racist “patriots” whose antigovernment revolt was initiatedwith the bombing of a federal building—which may have providedthe model for the bombing of the Murrah building—McVeigh wasincensed by what he considered the criminal actions of the federal governmentin the siege and burning of the Branch Davidian compoundin Waco, Texas, two years earlier on 19 April 1993. The date of the