Six months ago, convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh could not wait to die. Now he wants to live at least long enough to prove his contention that the US government railroaded him by withholding evidence in his case.
McVeigh was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1997 for organizing and carrying out the blast that killed 168 men, women and children at the Alfred P. Murrah federal building on April 19th, 1995, the worst act of terrorism ever committed on American soil.
While he never admitted responsibility for the bombing in court, he did so subsequently in interviews with the authors of a book about him and he had ordered that all appeals to save his life be stopped.
But McVeigh, 33, changed his mind yesterday because, his attorneys said, he wanted the FBI held accountable for failing to turn over 4,000 pages of evidence in his case.
Federal Judge Richard Matsch, who presided over McVeigh's trial in Denver, has set a hearing for Wednesday on the request for a stay of McVeigh's scheduled June 11th execution.
In Oklahoma City, relatives of people killed in the bombing and survivors of the blast were furious at the notion of McVeigh as a self-appointed government watchdog. They said the fact that documents were withheld does not shake their belief that he is guilty.
"Since when is Timothy McVeigh the watchdog of the government?" asked bombing survivor Fran Ferrari.
McVeigh was originally scheduled to die in the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, on May 16th but Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed back the execution date to June 11th after learning that thousands of pages of evidence had been withheld from the defense.
Mr Ashcroft has vowed to fight any further delay in the execution.