Timothy James McVeigh (April 23, 1968 - June 11, 2001) was an American domestic terrorist convicted and given the death penalty for his part in the Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people.
The bombing was carried out on April 19, 1995 through the detonation of a 7000-pound explosive device consisting of ANFO (ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil), stored in a rented Ryder truck parked in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
McVeigh was a decorated veteran of the United States Army, having served in the Gulf War. In interviews following the Oklahoma city bombing, McVeigh said he began harboring anti-government feelings during the Gulf War, when he felt guilt over the enemy soldiers he had killed while fighting there. He also said he was further influenced by the 1993 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raid on the Waco, Texas compound of the Branch Davidians.
McVeigh was convicted of the murder of eight federal employees who died in the explosion. The federal government could not, however, bring charges against McVeigh for the majority of the other murders because those deaths fell under the jurisdiction of the state of Oklahoma. One of his appeals made it to the Supreme Court of the United States, which on March 8, 1999 upheld his murder convictions. McVeigh was executed on June 11, 2001, by lethal injection, at the U.S. Federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. This was the first execution held by the U.S. Federal Government in more than 38 years.
The events surrounding the Oklahoma City Bombing has lead some to theorize that McVeigh was framed by the US Government, which planned the attack so as to have grounds for persecuting right-wing organizations in a manner similar to how the Nazis prosecuted their enemies following the Reichstag fire. Evidences for this position include the analysis performed by Brigadier General Benton K. Partin (Ret), who concluded that "the damage at the Murrah Federal Building is not the result of the truck bomb itself, but rather due to other factors such as locally placed charges within the building itself", as well as seismograph readings indicating the posibility of multiple explosions.
See also: Oklahoma City bombing, terrorism