A longtime fugitive suspected in a series of bombings in the southern United States, including at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and an Alabama abortion clinic, was captured on Saturday in the North Carolina town where he left his last trace.
Eric Robert Rudolph, “the most notorious American fugitive on the FBI’s most-wanted list,” was apprehended by local authorities in Murphy, North Carolina, Attorney General John Ashcroft said in a statement. Rudolph, 36, faces federal charges in the July 1996 bombing at Centennial Olympic Park, which killed a Georgia woman at the Summer Olympics and injured more than 100 people. He is also suspected in bombings at an Atlanta abortion clinic and a gay nightclub, which caused injuries, but no fatalities. The suspect was found hiding in a dumpster behind a store at 4:30 a.m. EST (0830 GMT) by a Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department deputy in Murphy, North Carolina, according to David Martinez, an FBI spokesman in the state. The western North Carolina town was where Rudolph’s abandoned pickup truck was found after the Jan. 29, 1998, bombing of the abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, in which an off-duty police officer was killed and a nurse injured. Full Story
