Murders Alabama

A tear streamed down Emily Lyons' scarred right cheek from her remaining eye, closed tightly against the bright lights. She held up her right hand, mangled and red. Four weeks after nearly dying in an abortion-clinic bombing that killed an off-duty police officer, Lyons quietly posed questions for the bomber whose homemade handiwork ripped apart her body. "What were you thinking?" Lyons, a clinic nurse, said from her wheelchair Monday. "Did you really feel that this would change something?"

No longer a witness wanted for questioning, 31-year-old Eric Robert Rudolph is now officially a hunted suspect in the nation's first fatal bombing of an abortion clinic.

After being checked for booby-traps, the pickup truck owned by a man sought as a witness in the fatal Alabama abortion clinic bombing was towed out of a backwoods pasture by federal agents near the town of Murphy. Owner Eric Robert Rudolph, 31, was nowhere to be seen. The Jan. 29 blast at the clinic in Birmingham, the nation's first fatal abortion clinic bombing, killed a security guard. Witnesses reported seeing Rudolph's pickup near the clinic.

One week after it was bombed, an abortion clinic reopened as authorities looked for evidence at a North Carolina mobile home and warned gay bars in the area to be on guard. Investigators swarmed the streets around the New Woman All Women Health Care Clinic in Birmingham as it reopened a week after a guard was killed and a nurse seriously injured.

The same shadowy group that took responsibility for two bombings in Atlanta last year now claims to have planted the bomb that ripped through a Birmingham, Ala., abortion clinic last week, killing one off-duty police officer and critically injuring a nurse.

Dozens of federal agents searched Franklin, a remote region of the southern Appalachian Mountains, for a man they believe could help them locate the bomber of an abortion clinic. The man being sought, Eric Robert Rudolph, was wanted as a witness and not as a suspect in the fatal bombing in Birmingham, Ala., U.S. Atty. Doug Jones said. A pickup truck registered to Rudolph, 31, was seen near the site of the bombing that killed an off-duty police officer and critically injured a nurse.

Investigators said Friday that they want to question a man whose pickup was seen near an abortion clinic right after a bomb blast killed a guard there. A warrant was issued for 31-year-old Eric Robert Rudolph, said U.S. Atty. Doug Jones, but he stressed that Rudolph is a possible witness and is not under suspicion in Thursday's bombing. "No one should jump to any conclusions about the fact we are seeking Mr. Rudolph," he said. Rudolph's last address was in Marble, N.C.

A small homemade bomb rocked an abortion clinic early Thursday, severely injuring a nurse and killing a Birmingham police officer who moonlighted as the clinic's security guard. The nation's first fatal bombing of an abortion clinic left a hole in the ground outside the New Woman All Women Health Care Clinic and shook buildings for blocks around. Students at the University of Alabama were awakened by the blast about 7:30 a.m. Many said the sound was sickening--and instantly recognizable.

Citing new information, the Justice Department said Thursday it has reopened its investigation of a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls and changed the course of the civil rights movement. The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, along with the slayings of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi the following year, helped expose the depth of racial hatred in the South. It has been credited by many with building congressional support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Gov. Fob James refused to block the execution in Atmore, Ala., early today of Henry Francis Hays, a member of the Ku Klux Klan who killed a 19-year-old black man in a case that ultimately bankrupted the United Klans of America, the klan faction that had incited the crime. Hays, 42, was convicted in the 1981 slaying of Michael Donald, who was abducted from a Mobile street. Prosecutors said the random slaying was ordered by klan leaders "to show klan strength in Alabama."