Withheld Evidence Fuels Conspiracy Theories

May 11 -- The revelation that thousands of pages of evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing investigation were withheld has revived the question of whether there was a broader terrorist conspiracy involved in the attack that killed 168 people.

And it has raised the specter in some people's minds of a government conspiracy to railroad Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols and to silence any suspicion that anyone else besides those two could have been involved.

"There could be a benign interpretation and it could all be irrelevant," said Stephen Jones, McVeigh's former attorney. "On the other hand, it could be a malignant failure to turn over [evidence]."

Justice Department officials maintain that there is nothing in the 200 or so documents, comprising more than 3,000 pages, that would indicate either McVeigh or Nichols was innocent. But Jones and others wonder whether it wasn't more than oversight that kept the evidence from being brought to light before the trials of the two men.

The FBI said the documents were scattered throughout 46 offices, and said they were not intentionally withheld from the defense. Most of the evidence was gathered within the first few days of the investigation, and was not discovered until an archivist in Oklahoma City requested that all documents related to the bombing be forwarded to that office, officials said.

Jones tried to build his case on the contention that McVeigh was just a foot soldier in a broader scheme, and said he believes the withheld documents could have helped him do that.

‘I Know the FBI Did It’

Nichols' attorney, Michael Tigar, expressed no doubts about the FBI's role in the matter.

"I'm not sure the prosecutors intentionally did it. I know the FBI intentionally did it," he said.

The two attorneys are not alone in their belief that the government should have looked more closely at the possibility that there was a broader conspiracy involved.

Some of the survivors and family members of the victims of the bombing have never accepted that McVeigh and Nichols acted alone, and the fact that so much evidence was overlooked — or even suppressed, as some suggest — disturbed them.