Bombings Alabama

Authorities have decided a bomb that injured an Alabama priest was aimed at him and not at a neighboring federal agent, and they are investigating ties to Maryland, a newspaper reported. Officials now say that the Rev. Michael D. Schnatterly, an assistant at Christ Episcopal Church in St. Michaels, Md., from 1989 to 1992, was the intended target, the (Easton) Star Democrat reported.

Federal authorities Thursday began dragging a lake for evidence in the investigation of mail bombings in the South, and a junk dealer who had been questioned extensively by the FBI hired an attorney and quit cooperating with authorities. The junk dealer, Robert Wayne O'Ferrell, continued to protest that he is innocent. No charges have been filed in the case, in which a federal judge in Birmingham and a civil rights attorney in Georgia were killed by bombs last month.

Racial hatred and a desire to halt the civil rights movement led a Ku Klux Klansman to bomb a Birmingham church in 1963, killing four black girls, a federal prosecutor said on the opening day of the historic murder trial. Thomas Blanton Jr.'s "hatred and hostility toward African Americans" provided the 62-year-old defendant with a motive to bomb the 16th Street Baptist Church, U.S. Atty. Doug Jones told a Birmingham court.

Federal grand jurors in Birmingham, Ala., are hearing testimony in the reopened case of a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls. The Rev. John Cross, who was pastor of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church at the time of the explosion, said after his testimony that he had no trouble recalling the dynamite blast. In 1977, Ku Klux Klansman Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder in the explosion.

Blacks singing civil rights anthems picketed a Birmingham courthouse to protest a judge's ruling that an ex-Ku Klux Klansman is mentally unfit to stand trial in the '63 church bombing that killed four black girls. Demonstration leaders said Alabama has executed six mentally retarded black men since 1989, yet 72-year-old Bobby Frank Cherry apparently will go free without answering murder charges in the blast at 16th Street Baptist Church.

A nurse maimed in the nation's first fatal abortion clinic bombing left a Birmingham hospital with shrapnel still embedded in her body. A scarred, smiling Emily Lyons, who lost her left eye and suffered numerous injuries in the Jan. 29 explosion, held a vase of red and pink roses as husband Jeff Lyons rolled her out of University Hospital in a wheelchair. Lyons, 41, climbed into a limousine for the short ride home.

Federal investigators said here Wednesday that they have "no shortage" of leads in the recent mail-bomb murders of a federal judge and a lawyer in the South, but they acknowledged that the cases could remain unsolved for some time. Tom Moore, an FBI spokesman in Birmingham, Ala., noted that the 1979 murder of John Wood, a federal judge in Texas, "took almost five years to solve," but added that "we're cautiously optimistic that this won't take that long."

The two victims of mail bombs in the South had something in common--both were known as civil rights advocates, and both may have died for their activities. Judge Robert S. Vance, 58, had ordered busing for school desegregation, sided with blacks in suits against white-controlled city governments and reinstated a federal lawsuit against members of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama during his 11 years on the federal appeals court based in Atlanta.

The FBI is assigning more investigators and stepping up the search for a North Carolina fugitive on the theory that a recent abortion clinic bombing may be tied to two earlier bombings in the Atlanta area, including the explosion during the 1996 Olympic Games. Technicians for the FBI and the U.S.

A bomb that seriously injured an Episcopal priest on Monday may have been intended for a retired federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who lived across the street, investigators said Wednesday. A note attached to the bomb criticized the U.S. government and called for action against the ATF. The last sentence of the quarter-page note read: "At last the time has come for the [illegible] Alabama to unite against the ATF conspiracy."