The bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City by former US soldier Timothy McVeigh in 1995 remains the deadliest domestic terror attack in the nation's history
News Ashley Pemberton 22:30, 16 Apr 2025Updated 22:31, 16 Apr 2025
The US will this weekend mark the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, which saw 168 people killed and hundreds more injured when a truck blew up outside a federal building.
It remains the deadliest domestic terror attack in US history, but it was far from the only atrocity to befell the nation. Here, we look at some of the other attacks that rocked America.
Truck of doom
At 9.02am on 19th April, 1995, a truck packed with 7000lbs of explosives detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City, home to a variety of federal agencies.
It partially collapsed and among the scores of dead were nineteen children. Over 600 people were injured, dozens of cars destroyed and 300 buildings damaged.
Yet amid the devastation was a clue that would help convict the perpetrators. FBI investigators quickly discovered an ID number on a piece of wreckage from the truck.
A sketch of the man who’d rented the vehicle led them to identify ex-soldier and anti-government extremist Timothy McVeigh. He’d parked it outside the building that morning.
As it happened, McVeigh was already in custody having been stopped by a cop 90 minutes after the explosion, for driving another car without license plates and carrying an unregistered gun.
Evidence that he and accomplice Terry Nichols had bought the fertilizer and fuel oil used in the bomb helped to secure the pair’s conviction in 1997. McVeigh, 33, from New York, was executed by lethal injection in 2001. Nichols, 70, is still behind bars.
Boffin turned bomber…
Ted Kaczynski, born in Chicago, was a brilliant mathematician, but he gave up academia to live in a remote cabin while carrying out a bombing campaign across the US.
In the 1970s he quit his post at a university in California and started posting bombs in packages to people he thought were ruining the world with modern tech.
Between 1978 and 1995 he targeted universities, airlines and computer stores, murdering three people and injuring 23.
Nicknamed the Unabomber, the FBI struggled to identify the shadowy villain, until they co-operated with newspapers to run his anonymous 35,000-word ‘manifesto’, hoping someone would recognise the style. His brother, David, did and alerted the authorities.
In 1996 Kaczynski’s tiny cabin in Montana was raided, where he was found bearded and bedraggled preparing to mail out another bomb.
Pleading guilty to murder in 1998 and sentenced to serve consecutive life terms, he hanged himself in prison, aged 81, in 2023.
Ku Klux Killers…
Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr described it as “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.”
The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, certainly rocked America. At the time Birmingham was one of the most segregated cities in the US and the church was a key meeting place for the civil rights movement.
It was a Sunday morning, when the blast ripped through one of the church walls killing four African-American girls: Addie Mae Collins, 14, Carol Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, 14. Their bodies were left horribly maimed and many other people were injured.
Fifteen sticks of dynamite attached to a timing device had been hidden under the church steps, causing the explosion.
The FBI concluded that racist Ku Klux Klan members Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash and Thomas E. Blanton, Jr had carried out the attack.
But a lack of evidence at the time meant they weren’t convicted of the murders until years later, with the last killer sentenced in 2002.
Carnage at the Olympics…
On 27th July, 1996, Britain’s Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent won gold medals in the rowing at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia.
But across the city at the Centennial Olympic Park, tragedy had already struck in the early hours, when a bomb had exploded during a concert.
Despite a warning call, the device, hidden in a backpack underneath a bench, had exploded before a full evacuation could be made.
Alice Hawthorne, 44, was killed and her daughter badly injured. Over 100 other people were hurt.
In the aftermath a security guard, who’d found the bomb, was wrongly suspected, while the real culprit, Florida-born Eric Rudolph, eluded cops.
He went on to plant three more bombs, killing a police officer in the process. When he finally became a suspect, Rudolph hid out in mountains living rough, until he was arrested while searching a bin in 2003.
Two years later he pleaded guilty to carrying out the bombings, as a protest against abortion. Rudolph, now 58, is serving multiple life sentences.
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