Twenty-five years on from the domestic terrorist bomb that shook the Olympics

TODAY is the 25th anniversary of the terrorist bombing of the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia.

On July 27, 1996, a pipe bomb exploded in the Centennial Olympic Park during a late night concert by pop band Jack Mack and the Heart Attack.

Packed with dynamite and deadly masonry nails, three pipe bombs were contained in a 16kgs army field pack. The explosion caught the concert-goers even as they were fleeing the scene.

HOW MANY WERE HURT?

DELIBERATELY designed to cause mayhem and injury, the explosion killed one woman, Alice Hawthorne, 44, of Albany in Georgia. One of the nails penetrated her skull causing fatal injuries. A Turkish cameraman, 40-year-old Melih Uzunyol, died of a heart attack as he ran to cover the bombing.

In total, 111 other people were injured, many suffering multiple wounds. Only quick work by medical staff on the scene and doctors at four local hospitals kept the death toll from increasing, and later, an expert report found that all who suffered serious injuries had recovered as well as possible. Had it not been for security guard Richard Jewell, however, there would undoubtedly have been many more deaths.

WHO WAS RICHARD JEWELL?

HIRED as a temporary security guard, Jewell was on duty near the concrete sound tower near the stage when he noticed the unattended green pack. He raised the alarm and he and his colleagues began to move people away from the pack. Even as they were doing so, a warning call to police told them there was a bomb set to go off at Centennial Olympic Park within 30 minutes.

Agents of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raced to the scene along with bomb disposal personnel, but the bomb exploded just after 1.20am while some people were just 75 yards away, and they took the brunt of the explosion.

Jewell, 33, was hailed as a hero, but then the FBI decided that Jewell was a “person of interest”, largely because they thought he was a loner out to make himself a hero. “FBI suspects ‘hero’ guard may have planted bomb,” said the front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on July 30, and Jewell’s life became a nightmare.

Kent Alexander, the US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia at the time of the 1996 Olympics, had shaken Jewell by the hand and later wrote about the subsequent events in a book called The Suspect, which formed the basis of Clint Eastwood’s film, Richard Jewell, which came out in 2019. Alexander told Sky News: “That bomb was the largest type of that kind the FBI and the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) had ever seen. And it had a directional plate. During the course of events which [Jewell] triggered, the plate ended up facing skywards instead of straight out into the crowd. He certainly saved a lot of lives. It was devastating, but it would have been far more devastating.”

Trial by media helped by a leak from the investigators convicted Jewell in the public mind. Alexander was furious, but adopted a “softly, softly” wait-and-see approach.

Jewell was never arrested and was never charged. After 88 days, the FBI cleared him. He suffered post-traumatic stress disorder on top of his advanced diabetes and died of a heart attack in August 2007, at the age of just 44.

WHO DID IT AND WHY?

THE real bomber was Eric Robert Rudolph, a right-wing loner and a survivalist who was convinced that the Games were part of a socialist plot. He was anti-aborton, anti-liberal, anti-government, anti-just-about-everything, and he became one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted individuals when he planted three more bombs between 1996 and 1998.

The two explosions in Georgia and one in Birmingham, Alabama, resulted in multiple injuries and the death of a police officer. He was one of the first people to be declared a domestic terrorist and the manhunt was long and over a vast area.

He disappeared in 1998 before being arrested in Murphy, North Carolina, on May 31, 2003 by an alert police officer. According to Chris Swecker, then in command of the Bureau’s Charlotte, North Carolina office in the FBI’s official history, “three members of the task force in particular kept the focus on western North Carolina. If not for them, the whole investigation might have dwindled down to just one or two agents. They were adamant he was in the area, absolutely adamant, in the face of a lot of skepticism. I think 90% of the population had written off Rudolph as being out of the area, long gone, or dead.”

FBI agents found all the evidence they needed in the many cabins and caves where he had lived for years. The haul included 250kgs of dynamite.

WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM?

RUDOLPH did a plea bargain to save himself from the death sentence. He is currently serving four life sentences without parole at ADX Florence Supermax Prison in Colorado.