Bomb Relatives Sign Up O J's Lawyer

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Washington

MORE than 300 relatives of those killed in the Oklahoma bomb blast two years ago have signed up with O J Simpson's defence lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, in a lawsuit against the US government.

The "wrongful death" petition was filed in the District Court of Oklahoma County at the end of last week to the consternation of the US Justice Department, which is already struggling to prevent the criminal trial of Tim McVeigh from degenerating into judicial farce.

The blast killed 168 people on April 19 1995. Mr Cochran and his Oklahoma co-counsel John Merritt allege that the bombing was a bungled sting operation by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), and that numerous federal officials had "detailed prior knowledge of the planned bombing" yet "failed to prevent it from taking place".

It is part of a scattershot series of lawsuits that also targets Britain's chemical company ICI on the grounds that its "agent", ICI Explosives USA, manufactured the fertilizer that might have been used in the bombing. The evident purpose of hounding any entity with "deep pockets", however tenuously linked to the explosion, is sure to provoke criticism that some families are coveting blood money.

A claim filed in a US federal court last month by 50 families was clearly motivated by suspicions of an FBI cover-up, not by pecuniary gain.

The case against ICI Explosives USA is unlikely to get very far since it was based on the original conclusions of the FBI that the lorry bomb was built with ammonium nitrate. A damning report by the Inspector General of the Justice Department has concluded that the fertilizer hypothesis was not based on forensic evidence from the crime scene. It was conjured out of thin air after ammonium nitrate fertilizer was found at the home of Tim McVeigh's co-defendant, Terry Nichols.

The report noted that a dynamite wrapper was found at the bombing site, as was nitroglycerine, a major component of dynamite. And dynamite, as it happens, contains ammonium nitrate.

But the Cochran suit against the FBI is a more serious matter. Documents provided to The Telegraph indicate that the Tulsa office of the ATF was about to arrest a group of neo-Nazis plotting to blow up Federal buildings in Oklahoma - based on the undercover surveillance of their informant Carol Howe - when the FBI intervened in February 1995 to stop the raid.

It appears that the local ATF had stumbled on a bigger operation being run by the grown-ups at the Justice Department. Two months later the Murrah building was blown up.

So the FBI has some explaining to do.