Prosecutors have asked an Alabama court to confine a former Ku Klux Klansman to a state mental hospital to determine if he is competent for trial in a church bombing that killed four black girls.

Prosecutors asked an Alabama court yesterday to confine a former Ku Klux Klansman to a state mental hospital to determine if he is competent for trial in a church bombing that killed four black girls.

Lawyers for a former Ku Klux Klansman accused of murder in the 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls in Alabama said they would begin their case today by arguing that prosecutors had not proved their case.