Timothy McVeigh

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Timothy McVeigh (left phantom )

Timothy James McVeigh (* 23. April 1968 in Pendleton , New York ; † 11. June 2001 in Terre Haute , Indiana ) perpetrated in 1995 with Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier to the Oklahoma City bombing , in which Episode 168 people died. In 1997 he was sentenced to death for this act and executed in 2001 .

Childhood and youth

Timothy McVeigh was born the second of three children to a Catholic family of Irish descent and grew up in Pendleton, New York . His father worked in a General Motors factory ; his mother was a housewife. When he was ten years old, his parents divorced and he was raised by his father.

McVeigh was interested in firearms from an early age. His grandfather often took him into the woods to shoot.

During his school days, McVeigh was considered an outsider. He himself claimed to have been bullied at school and to have sought refuge in a fantasy world in which he repaid his attackers. He later referred to the US government as the "ultimate bully ". He was also considered a computer specialist and hacked into US government systems under the pseudonym "The Wanderer".

After graduating from high school in 1986, he briefly attended Bryant & Stratton College , but dropped out after three months. He then worked at Burger King until 1987 and then with a security service in Buffalo . During this time, he read a lot about weapons technology, gun law and survival training, as well as the anti-Semitic and racist Turner diaries .

Military time

In May 1988, McVeigh joined the US Army . In the basic training at Fort Benning he met his future accomplices Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier know. After basic training, he was transferred to Fort Riley . He was trained as a gunner on an armored personnel carrier and was a platoon leader . In 1991 he took part in the Second Gulf War as a sergeant . For his services in the war he was awarded the Bronze Star , the Achievement Medal, the Southwest Asia Service Medal and the Kuwaiti Liberation Medal. After unsuccessful application for the Special Forces , he left the army in December 1991.

Life between military service and attack

After serving in the Army, McVeigh made a living with another security agency in Buffalo. There he sometimes had to work up to 80 hours a week and had no opportunities for advancement. His life after the military service frustrated him greatly. He later stated that he may have suffered from post- traumatic stress disorder at the time . During this time, his dislike of the government also increased. He became increasingly concerned with anti-government and conspiracy theoretic literature, the content of which he also told his environment. He believed that the government was planning to abolish Amendment 2 of the US Constitution and disarm the citizens in order to establish a police state with high taxes. The events of Ruby Ridge , where several people, including a 14-year-old boy and a young mother, were killed in a shooting with sympathizers of a racist organization provoked by investigators from the American federal authorities in the summer of 1992, confirmed his fears. He was a member of the National Rifle Association , but gave up his membership because he considered the NRA's attitude to gun law to be too restrictive.

In January 1993, McVeigh left security and left his homeland to drive across America to visit his old army friends. During this time he stayed in motels and trailer parks and made a living selling anti-government T-shirts, headgear, bumper stickers and weapons. During the 51-day siege of the property of the Davidian sect near Waco (Texas) by the FBI , he temporarily traveled to the scene to observe what was going on. He then visited his former army comrade Michael Fortier in Kingman (Arizona) , who shared his views against the Waco siege, gun control , the United Nations and the " New World Order ". In the following time he lived with Fortier and his wife Lori until he visited Terry Nichols on his farm in Decker ( Michigan ). While at Decker, McVeigh, along with Terry Nichols and his brother, watched the siege of Waco ended on April 19, 1993 with the FBI storming the Davidian estate, killing 82 people. The event greatly outraged all three and further exacerbated McVeigh's radically anti-government views.

He sympathized with anti-government militias , but was not a member of any of them. In the following period, McVeigh and Terry Nichols decided to plan an attack against the government and asked Fortier if he would help them, which Fortier had agreed to do. McVeigh, Nichols and Fortier now began to plan and prepare the attack systematically.

Bomb attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City

Timothy McVeigh leaving a courthouse in Perry, Oklahoma , two days after the attack

On April 19, 1995, McVeigh carried out the Oklahoma City attack that killed 168 people and injured over 800. Until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 , it was considered the heaviest and most momentous attack in US history. McVeigh had the Murrah Federal Building deliberately chosen because there departments hated him federal ATF , DEA and USS were. The date was also carefully chosen: April 19, 1995 was the second anniversary of the storming of Waco and the 220th anniversary of the battles at Lexington and Concord .

To do this, McVeigh parked a rented truck in front of the building that was loaded with an explosive device from ANNM , which he and Nichols and Fortier had made from 2.4 tons of ammonium nitrate ( mineral fertilizer ) and several hundred liters of nitromethane ( dragster fuel additive). The explosive device detonated at 9:02 a.m. local time. McVeigh was arrested at a traffic stop about an hour later for missing a license plate and possession of a weapon illegal in Oklahoma. He was identified as the perpetrator of the bomb attack because a vehicle axle that could not be assigned to any of the damaged vehicles was found at the site of the attack. The associated vehicle could then be identified using the vehicle number entered. It was a yellow Ford F-700 built in 1993, which had been rented under the name Robert Kling from Ryder Car Rental . A large FBI contingent then tracked down a motel owner who remembered someone staying in such a truck under the name Timothy McVeigh.

At the time of his arrest, McVeigh was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words Sic semper tyrannis ( Latin : "So [shall it] always be the case with tyrants "), the words that John Wilkes Booth is said to have proclaimed after he shot Lincoln.

Trial and Execution

McVeigh justified the assassination attempt in court, among other things, as an act of revenge for the events in Waco. He showed no remorse, but claimed that he did not know at the time of the crime that the building also had a kindergarten and that he could have chosen a different destination if he had known. He described the killed children as " collateral damage " and justified his act with reference to the fact that the US government also accepts the death of children in its military operations .

At times, conspiracy theories circulated in the United States that the Ku Klux Klan , Arab terrorists, the Irish Republican Army , German neo-Nazis and the Oklahoma-based son of the former Parliamentary State Secretary Günter Straßmeir ( CDU ) were all involved in the attack. Although there was no evidence for this, the thesis with Straßmeir was supported by McVeigh's defense attorney Stephen Jones, because he only wanted to make his client appear as a henchman and thus reduce his guilt.

In prison, McVeigh describes himself politically as a libertarian . In the 1996 presidential election in the United States , he voted for Harry Browne , the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate . He complained about claims in the media that he was a racist for reading Turner's diaries . He liked the book because of its anti-government content; On the other hand, he rejects the racism of the book. Religiously, he called himself an agnostic and stated that science was his religion. Before he was executed, however, he received the anointing of the sick . During his imprisonment, he was temporarily housed in the ADX Florence federal prison in the same cell block as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef , one of the masterminds of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center . Yousef made regular unsuccessful attempts there to persuade McVeigh to convert to Islam .

McVeigh was on 13 June 1997 by a federal court sentenced to death and on 11 June 2001 in the federal prison in Terre Haute by lethal injection executed after his final appeal for clemency by US President George W. Bush had been rejected. He is said to have told a journalist before his execution that, to put it “in the crudest way”, it was 168 to one for him and that he felt himself to be the winner. As a hangman's meal, he ate a liter of peppermint chocolate ice cream. He waived the right to speak one last word before the execution. Instead, he left a handwritten letter in which he quoted the poem Invictus by the English poet William Ernest Henley . One of the witnesses appointed by McVeigh for the execution was the writer Gore Vidal , who a few months later reported in Vanity Fair magazine about his correspondence with McVeigh and his execution.

McVeigh's body was cremated. This was the first execution by federal authorities since the March 15, 1963 Victor Feguer by hanging had been executed.

Until his execution, McVeigh refused to name accomplices. His lawyers Stephen Jones and Robert Nigh assumed until the end that McVeigh was just one of many perpetrators. As an accomplice, Terry Nichols were later sentenced to life imprisonment and Michael Fortier, who had testified as a witness, to twelve years imprisonment.

literature

  • Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck: American terrorist. Regan Books, New York 2001, ISBN 0-06-039407-2 .
  • Gore Vidal : The Importance of Timothy McVeigh. (Vidal on his correspondence with McVeigh) in: GV: Eternal War for Eternal Peace. How America reaps the hatred it has sown. EVA, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-434-50539-3 , pp. 71-103.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Timothy McVeigh. In: edition.cnn.com. March 29, 2001, accessed January 2, 2017 .
  2. ^ A b Ancestry of Tim McVeigh. In: wargs.com. Retrieved January 2, 2017 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Brent L. Smith, Kelly R. Damhousse, Paxton Roberts: Pre-Incident Indicators of Terrorist Incidents: The Identification of Behavioral, Geographic and Temporal Patterns of Preparatory Conduct . Document No .: 214217, May 2006, pp. 234-242, at: NCJRS government website and Scribd website . Retrieved March 21, 2017.
  4. ↑ BBC News - AMERICAS - Inside McVeigh's mind. In: news.bbc.co.uk. June 11, 2001, accessed January 2, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Alston Chase: A Mind for Murder. WW Norton & Company, 2004, ISBN 978-0-393-32556-0 , p. 370 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  6. ^ Lou Michel, Dan Herbeck: American Terrorist , ISBN 0-06-039407-2 , p. 111.
  7. ↑ a b Gore Vidal : Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. P. 1, 81.
  8. ↑ Oklahoman: Ready for execution, McVeigh says he's sorry for deaths. In: newsok.com. June 9, 2001, accessed January 2, 2017 .
  9. ↑ Timothy J. McVeigh: An Essay on Hypocrisy . In: Media Bypass magazine . June 1998.
  10. ↑ Gamerschlag: TERRORISM: "Stranger from Germany" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 23 , 1997 ( online ).
  11. ↑ Gamerschlag, Höges: "I am a rebel" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 23 , 1997 ( online ).
  12. ↑ Anthony York, salon.com, April 18, 2001 ( August 25, 2006 memento in the Internet Archive ); Retrieved July 17, 2006.
  13. ↑ Lou Michel, Dan Herbeck: American Terrorist. P. 298.
  14. ↑ Lawrence W. Myers: Tim McVeigh: An Interview. Media Bypass, February 1996, p. 36.
  15. ↑ Timothy McVeigh: Convicted Oklahoma City Bomber. In: archives.cnn.com. March 29, 2001, archived from the original on March 8, 2005 ; accessed on January 2, 2017 .
  16. ^ Julian Borger: McVeigh faces day of reckoning. In: theguardian.com. November 11, 2016, accessed January 2, 2017 .
  17. ↑ 'The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist'. In: msnbc.msn.com. April 15, 2010, accessed January 2, 2017 .
  18. ^ Lou Michel, Dan Herbeck: American Terrorist , ISBN 0-06-039407-2 , pp. 142-143.
  19. ^ McVeigh took last rites before execution. In: CNN . June 11, 2001, accessed January 2, 2017 .
  20. ↑ Lou Michel, Dan Herbeck: American Terrorist , ISBN 0-06-039407-2 , pp. 360-361.
  21. ↑ Sentenced to Die ( Memento of March 23, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  22. ^ McVeigh's Final Day Before Execution. In: abcnews.go.com. July 10, 2001, accessed January 2, 2017 .
  23. ^ Defiant McVeigh dies in silence. In: news.bbc.co.uk. June 11, 2001, accessed January 2, 2017 .
  24. ↑ The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh ( Memento December 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME McVeigh, Timothy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McVeigh, Timothy James (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American terrorist
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH Pendleton , USA
DATE OF DEATH June 11, 2001
Place of death Terre Haute , USA