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| Home Front: WoT |
| Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef (Part 9) |
| 2004-04-09 |
| I wrote this. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 In September 1994, Philippine police arrested six members of the Abu Sayyaf Group. The subsequent interrogations provided several leads toward several conspirators in Manila. One was Tareq Kaved Rana, a Pakistani who owned a house in Parañaque, a Manila suburb. (Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia, page 102; Ressa, Seeds of Terror, page 33). At the end of November, Yousef’s group exploded a bomb in Cebu City, and on December 1 the group exploded a bomb in a Manila movie theater. On December 11, Yousef planted a bomb on an airplane while flying from Manila to Cebu City. The bomb exploded inside the plane after it took off again. (Terry Nichols had arrived in Cebu City on November 23.) At about that same time, the Philippine Presidential Security Group (PSG) was tipped off that some Middle Easterners would try to assassinate the Pope, who was scheduled to visit on January 15. In connection with this tip, the PSG focused particular attention on Rana. Yousef sometimes stayed in Rana’s house during this period. While the house was under PSG surveillance, it burned down. The PSG deduced that the fire occurred accidentally while Yousef was manufacturing bombs there. (I don’t know the dates of the fire or of the PSG’s deduction.) In late December, Yousef called Murad in Dubai and convinced him to move to Manila. (Seeds of Terror, pages 28-33). Murad arrived in Manila on December 26 and moved in with Yousef in a sixth-floor apartment in a six-floor apartment building. Yousef’s first assignment for Murad was to help plan for someone to crash a crop-dusting airplane into the Pope’s motorcade during an upcoming visit. On January 6, 1995, the Philippine police broke up Yousef’s bomb-making operation in the apartment. The police started a fire in order to set off the building’s alarms, thereby forcing everyone to evacuate the building. During the evacuation, the police searched the apartment. (Gerald Posner, Why America Slept, page 78 footnote). Since the search of the apartment was illegal, the Philippine government concocted an incredible false story about a clever policewoman who looked into the apartment after the firemen had left and found a well-equipped bomb-making factory that the firemen had failed to notice. (This yarn is recounted with many fanciful details in Seeds of Terror, pages 32-38.) Murad was arrested as he came back into the building, but Yousef managed to escape. Murad was interrogated by the PSG for two days, but refused to talk. Then he was turned over to the Philippine Special Operations Group and immediately began singing like a bird. He revealed that he and Yousef had been involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. As soon as Yousef’s fingerprints in Apartment #603 were identified, Murad was turned over to the FBI, although he remained in Philippine custody for three months. (Seeds of Terror, pages 38-40.) Wali Khan Amin Shah, another member of Yousef’s cell, was arrested on January 11 but escaped two days later. According to a PSG colonel who was involved in breaking up the cell, Shah perhaps was allowed to escape so that he would lead them to Yousef or other associates. The PSG already knew that Yousef was now in Kuala Lampur because of intercepted phone conversations between Yousef and his Philippine girlfriend. (Militant Islam in Southeast Asia, pages 107-108.) ============= On January 14, Terry Nichols, still in the Philippines, phoned his ex-wife Lana Padilla in Las Vegas. He informed her that he had decided to return to the United States immediately and asked her to pick him up at the Las Vegas airport two days later. Nichols’ current wife Marife had agreed to a compromise in which she would finish her classes and then join him in the United States in about eight weeks. Although Nichols had no job or residence or obligations in the United States, he did not want to extend his visa or ticket so that he could stay with her for those eight weeks and help her move. He had to leave the Philippines right then. On January 15 the Pope arrived in Manila. Nichols returned to Las Vegas on January 16 and traveled to Kansas on January 18. In the following weeks he began developing a new business. Rather than manufacturing and selling bomb-making kits, he would manufacture and sell boxes that militia groups could use for packing their own home-made meals-ready-to-eat. In mid-February he bought a house in Herington, Kansas, paying $28,000. On March 11, McVeigh furiously told Michael Fortier that Nichols had decided to stop helping to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building. Fortier declined to help too. Shortly before Marife arrived on March 17, Nichols told his ex-wife Lana that he and McVeigh "are going to go our separate ways, and I’m going to do the [gun] shows myself." (Hamm, Apocalypse in Oklahoma, pages 193-195.) McVeigh still intended to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building on April 19 and now needed someone else to help him, since Nichols and Fortier refused. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #1 Mike, you are an excellent researcher...have you been in touch with Jayne Davis? |
| Posted by: Anonymous4106 2004-04-09 2:25:43 PM |