THE Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, has dismissed as "crazy silly season stories" claims linking Irish republicans to the bomb attack in Oklahoma City in the USA, which killed 168 people. Ms Mairead Keane, head of the party's Washington office, said the claims were "preposterous rubbish", adding "The claim that Sinn Fein provided the detonator for the Oklahoma bomb is nonsense. Any student of the Anglo Irish conflict will tat as absurd the claims of an Iraq/US neo Nazi/white supremacist and Irish republican conspiracy."
Ms Keane was responding to newspaper allegations that republicans had supplied the detonator two years ago for what is regarded as the worst terrorist attack in North America. Documents submitted to the court in Denver where the trial of the chief suspect, Mr Timothy McVeigh, will begin today allege that a neo Nazi cell conspired to blow up a US federal building n early 1995 and had received assistance from "Sinn Fein", described as "the Irish terrorist group".
According to yesterday's Sunday Telegraph, Mr McVeigh's lawyer, Mr Stephen Jones, visited Northern Ireland and interviewed a number of IRA members and officials from MI5 and Belfast counter terrorism experts. He said:
"The greatest concentration of expertise in the world on this kind of explosion is sitting in London and Belfast." Mr McVeigh's defence says it was the neo Nazi group, based in Elohim City, Oklahoma, which called itself the Ayran Republican Army, which was responsible for the attack.