Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

500 • OLYMPIC PARK BOMBINGbombing also coincided with the execution date for Richard W. Snell,The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord member whomurdered a black Arkansas state trooper in June 1984. McVeigh hadconvinced himself that his outrage was shared by millions of otherAmericans and that his attack on the Murrah building would be hailedby many as the signal for a general right-wing revolution against theU.S. government. In reality, for the first two days after the bombingmost news media were pursuing the false lead of a Middle Easternconnection, and most Americans were greatly shocked to learn that themain suspect for what was at that time the most horrific act of terrorismon U.S. soil was in fact a fellow citizen.On 2 June 1997 Timothy McVeigh was found guilty for the bombing;he was sentenced to death on 14 August 1997 and executed on11 June 2001. Terry Nichols was convicted of conspiracy and involuntarymanslaughter on 23 December 1997 and sentenced to lifeimprisonment on 4 June 1998. In January 2000 the state of Oklahomabegan to try Nichols on 161 counts of first-degree murder, for whichhe was convicted on 26 May 2004 and sentenced to 161 consecutivelife terms. A third suspect, Michael Fournier, who had providedaid to McVeigh and who had foreknowledge of the planned attack,agreed to testify against McVeigh in return for reduced charges. Theincident served to draw public attention to the right-wing militiamovement and galvanized public demands for more effective legislativeand executive actions to counter terrorism. It should be notedthat McVeigh was never accepted into membership by the variousmilitias he approached, although he did have ties to the Elohim Citygroup in eastern Oklahoma, an Identity Christianity group, whichwas related to the former The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm ofthe Lord. Until the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks ofSeptember 11, 2001, the Oklahoma City bombing was the worstmass-casualty terrorist attack in U.S. history.OLYMPIC PARK BOMBING. The Atlanta Olympics experienceda pipe bombing on 27 July 1996 in the 21-acre Centennial OlympicPark that killed one person outright, injured 111 others, andcaused a Turkish journalist, Melih Uzunyol, to suffer a fatal heartattack. A local woman, Alice Hawthorne, was killed when shrapnelwounded her head. At 12:58 a.m. an unidentified white male with anundistinguishable accent called a 911 operator warning that a bomb