Jayna Davis: OKC and WTC Bombers Met in Philippines

Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols met with World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef in the Philippines before he and Timothy McVeigh carried out their plot, investigative reporter Jayna Davis said Wednesday.

"Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef met personally in the Philippines on the island of Mindanao in the early 1990s to discuss, of all things, bombmaking," Davis told ABC Radio Network host John Batchelor.

On Wednesday, an Oklahoma jury returned a 161-count murder verdict against Nichols. He is expected to face the death penalty. But the bizarre Yousef-Nichols tie-in did not come up in the trial.

Davis said she didn't think Nichols would ever discuss his relationship with Yousef, who devised a plot known as Operation Bojinka, a kamikaze airliner hijacking plan that became the blueprint for the 9/11 attacks.

"Sources close to the defense have told me, and this comes from recorded conversations with his wife, Lana Padilla, that Terry Nichols is going to remain clammed up for the rest of his natural days on earth," Davis told Batchelor.

"He wants to protect his son Joshua from any retaliation," she added. Filipino police informant Edwin Angeles, who first detailed meetings between Yousef and Nichols, was assassinated in 1998.

Yousef's partner in the Bojinka plot, Abdul Hakim Murad, was apprehended by Filipino police in 1994 and taken to New York to stand trial. On the morning of the OKC bombing, Murad summoned his jailers to tell them he and Yousef were connected to the crime. Later that day Murad gave the FBI a written confession.

Just months before his own June 2001 execution for the crime, Timothy McVeigh referred to both Yousef and Osama bin Laden in a letter to Fox News Channel's Rita Cosby.

"Collateral Damage? As an American news junkie; a military man; and a Gulf War veteran, where do they think I learned that? (It sure as hell wasn't Osama Bin Laden!)," he wrote in April 2001.

In the next sentence, McVeigh mentioned Yousef.

"For all else, I would refer you to my enclosed paper 'Hypocrisy,' and to Ramzi Yousef's statement to the court just prior to his sentencing. I filter all labels and insults thusly."

In the Jan. 8, 1998, court statement to which McVeigh referred, Yousef proclaimed, "Yes, I am a terrorist and proud of it as long as it is against the U.S. government," before being sentenced to 240 years in prison.

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