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press
release
John Michael
Johnston Attorney
at Law
228 Robert S. Kerr Blvd. Suite
620, Court plaza, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73102 (405) 235-4074
PRESS
RELEASE
Do Not Release Before
10 AM, Central 4-19-02
(Oklahoma City) Everyone knows what happened in Oklahoma City at the
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. However, only a
handful of people know that on that very day someone other than Tim
McVeigh or Terry Nichols “confessed” to being involved in the terrorist
bombing plot that killed 168 people in Oklahoma City.
Abdul Hakim Murrad
was a Federal prisoner at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New
York City. He was awaiting trial for his part in a plot to blow up a
dozen 747 airliners in the South Pacific. He announced to his jailers,
(and later told the FBI), the Oklahoma City bombing had been
orchestrated by his former roommate in the Philippines – Ramsey Youssef.
Youssef was the most wanted terrorist in the world until his capture in
Pakistan in February,1995. Ramsey Youssef had been the mastermind behind
the first World Trade Center attack in January of 1993.
Why should
Murrad be believed? For one thing, Murrad made his “confession”
voluntarily and spontaneously. Most important, Murrad tied Ramsey
Youssef to the OKC bombing long before Terry Nichols' was publicly
identified as a suspect. How could Murrad have known that eventually
Terry Nichols would become a defendant? Or, for that matter, that Terry
Nichols had recently spent a great deal of time in the Philippines,
especially Cebu City, during the precise times that Murrad and Youssef
were also there. How could Murrad have known that Nichols’ phone records
would show 13 unidentified calls from Kansas to the Philippines during
the period of early April 1995, in the days prior to the Bombing?
On the 7th
anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, a number of the victims of the
Murrah Building tragedy wish to begin the process of informing the
American people of an ever growing mountain of evidence implicating the
State of Iraq. This evidence will show that the Republic of Iraq and
Saddam Hussein were involved in funding and planning the Oklahoma City
bombing.
Perhaps even
more alarming is the realization that certain elements of the United
States government must have known about this foreign involvement all
along. Indeed, in a recent Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking to
obtain relevant information concerning John Doe II and the OKC bombing,
Federal Judge Wayne Alley observed in written orders ( June/July 2001)
that, “…The FBI had maintained a shroud of secrecy around the entire
bombing case since 1995.” Ignoring substantial evidence of a major
international terrorist offensive, conceived and planned in the
Philippines sometime between 1991 and 1994, which produced tragic
consequences of it’s own.
In ignoring
the Youssef inspired plan, Code named “Project Bojinka” or “Big Boom”,
the FBI created a situation that resulted in less than complete justice
for the victims of the OKC bombing.
Perhaps even more significant is the refusal
to thoroughly investigate evidence of foreign involvement in the
Oklahoma City Bombing resulted in a failure to anticipate the eventual
execution of the most horrific part of the “Project Bojinka” plans.
Specifically, other major terrorist acts were revealed on Ramsey
Youssef’s lap top computer, which was seized by Philippine authorities
in January 1995, as Abdul Hakim Murrad was arrested. The most
devastating of these new terrorist actions manifested itself on
September 11, 2001, in New York City, Washington DC and the countryside
of western Pennsylvania at a cost of almost 4,000 American civilian
dead.
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