More documents emerge in Oklahoma bomber case

Lawyers for Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh - who killed 168 people - have been given a second batch of previously undisclosed documents, it was reported today.

The evidence was found in an FBI office in the American city of Baltimore, and comes after his execution was delayed as the agency admitted more than 3,000 documents had not been given to the terrorist’s legal team at the time of his trial.

The discovery of yet more new evidence is a further embarrassment to the embattled FBI, which has come under fire for its failure to hand over the documents in line with an agreement between prosecutors and the defence.

And the thousands of pages of new evidence relate to a possible co-conspirator who aided McVeigh, FBI sources said.

The detective agency’s offices have now been issued with strict orders to search their files for anything to do with McVeigh and notify bosses immediately if anything is found.

‘‘Everybody is checking again,’’ an FBI insider said. ‘‘Everybody is going through everything again.’’

McVeigh had been due to die by lethal injection on Wednesday, but America’s attorney-general, who is in charge of the whole justice system, including the FBI, prosecutions and prisons, delayed his death for 30 days to give lawyers time to look at the evidence.

The Oklahoma bombing was America’s worst act of mass-murder, with 168 people dying, 19 of them children aged under five, when a massive bomb destroyed the Albert P Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19 1995.

McVeigh only admitted his guilt earlier this year to the authors of a new book, telling them the children who died were ‘‘collateral damage’’.

Seven new documents which had not been given to his lawyers turned up in Baltimore late last week and were given to the bomber’s lawyers yesterday.

Their contents and how many pages they run to have not been disclosed by the agency.

But the contents of the other 3,000 documents have begun to emerge, with it being revealed that they are witness statements and photographs relating to two mysterious figures investigators focused on in the aftermath of the bomb.

One is a man known as Robert Jacques, whom an estate agent claimed had been with McVeigh and his co-conspirator Terry Nicholls when they asked if he could find them a remote house ‘‘with caves’’ at the same time as they began assembling a bomb.

Jacques was never traced and the FBI could not authenticate the estate agent’s belief that McVeigh and Nicholls were the men with him.

The documents also focus on a shadowy figure dubbed John Doe 2, who was supposedly seen near the building when it was destroyed and include surveillance tapes of him.

A sketch of the man who the FBI initially believed was part of a wider conspiracy was distributed at the time, but later the agency said it did not believe he existed.

McVeigh’s convicted co-conspirator, Terry Nicholls, is appealing against his life sentence on the basis that he was part of a wider conspiracy.

Rumours and allegations of an FBI cover-up and a possible botched sting in the lead-up to the bombing have repeatedly claimed there was a right-wing conspiracy to cause the bomb and McVeigh and Nicholls did not act alone.