Representative: Local grand jury needed

Oklahoma lawmaker speaks at MSSC about probe of bombing
By Susan Redden
Globe Staff Writer

More investigation, this time by a local grand jury, is needed to answer lingering questions on the Oklahoma City bombing, an Oklahoma state representative said Thursday.

"This could be the most important case in our history, and there are too many questions that haven't been answered," state Rep. Charles Key told a crowd of about 100 at Missouri Southern State College.

Key and his supporters soon will begin circulating petitions to ask the courts for an Oklahoma grand jury to look into the April 19, 1995 bombing that killed 168 people at the alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. But the ability to seek a local investigation came, Key said, despite opposition from state officials and only after a legal battle that went all the way to the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

"If I had a dollar for every time I've been called a conspiracy theorist, I'd be a rich man," said the representative, who was first elected in 1968 and was re-elected last year by about 77 percent of the vote.

Key said he began looking into the explosion after encountering discrepancies in official accounts. He said it also raised questions on whether the government had prior knowledge of the bombing, and why the government is not working harder to bring forward information on John Doe No. 2, the dark-haired man identified as being with Timothy McVeigh before the bombing and the day it occurred.

About 100 people listened intently for more than two hours to the presentation by Key, held at Webster Auditorium at Missouri Southern State College. The event was sponsored by the College Republicans and the Stateline Pachyderm Club, a Republican education group.

Key named people he said were near the federal building who said they heard and felt more than one blast, and named a military munitions expert and a seismologist from the University of Oklahoma who have raised the possibility of more than one explosion.

He said another witness told federal officials in advance that some federal building in Oklahoma City would be the subject of a terrorist attack that day, the two-year anniversity of the burning of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas. He said others cited bomb threats on a government building they said had been called into local officials a week earlier.

And he said John Doe No. 2 was seen by a long list of witnesses who were never called to testify before the federal grand jury that indicted McVeigh and Terry Nichols.

"I don't know if it will find the whole truth, but I think it could find most of it," Key said of a local grand jury effort.

He is working with a group of people who want more information on the bombing, including Glenn Wilburn, who lost two grandchildren in the blast.

Page 6B, Friday, March 21, 1997


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