[JohnBerger]

Not on the McVeigh angle, but a lot more on Padilla's possible al Qaeda connections -- which then potentially lead to Nichols back at the site (I won't try to summarize here; it's pretty long).

Also, here's a little something I didn't post on whoisjohndoe2 because it's a little too weird and may well be an actual coincidence:

The bombing of the U.S. Consulate in Karachi on June 14 took place just three days after the State Department announced that they had picked up "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla's trail at the very same consulate in March, when he applied for a replacement passport.

Furthermore, the bomb used on the consulate was a fertilizer bomb of the same type used to destroy the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

I am a bit surprised no one in the major media has made the Karachi-Padilla connection at any rate. The bomb type is quite likely to be a coincidence (the fertilizer bomb is an oldie but goodie). The target choice, however, may not be.

[Fred Mertz]

That is more than weird. Thanks for sharing it with us.

[aristeides]

That article in the Washington Post on Sunday did call the bomb in Karachi a "fertilizer bomb." But that need not mean the bomb only contained fertilizer (indeed, I don't believe fertilizer by itself would explode). People claiming expertise on explosives have claimed an ANFO (ammonium nitrate fertilizer plus fuel oil) bomb would not have done the damage the OKC bomb did. I am no expert on explosives, and thus cannot confirm this claim, but, if it is true, it is presumably equally true of the bomb in Karachi.

I strongly suspect the Karachi, OKC, and East African embassy bombs all contained the mixture of ammonium nitrate, TNT, and nitroglycerine detailed on that notebook page entitled "Explosivija za Oklahomu" (Serbo-Croatian for "Explosive Used in Oklahoma") found at the house in Kabul last year. I strongly suspect such a mixture would have had the stronger secondary blast that apparently occurred at least in the OKC and East African bombings. Does anybody know if there was such a secondary blast in Karachi?

[honway]

The bomb type is quite likely to be a coincidence (the fertilizer bomb is an oldie but goodie). The target choice, however, may not be.

Has any group ever used this bomb other than the Middle Eastern terror network that includes al Qaeda, bin Laden, and Saddam?

WTC 1993
OKC
African Embassy bombings
Karachi