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Monday, May 12, 2003
Oklahoma bomber’s gold, money stashed in RP - Barbers
By Joshua Dancel
SENATOR Robert Barbers Saturday urged Philippine embassy officials to dig out the truth behind the gold bullion and money allegedly hidden by a convicted Oklahoma City bomber in the Philippines.
It was Lana Padilla, wife of convicted bomber Terry Nichols, who revealed that her husband hid money and gold bullion in the country months before the fateful Oklahoma bombing occurred, killing at least 100 Americans in an instant.
Foreign news reports said Padilla was testifying before a preliminary hearing that was trying to determine if there was enough evidence to raise her husband’s sentence from life to death for 160 state murder charges.
Padilla testified that she, together with her convicted husband, made a trip to the Philippines in late 1994. She said she discovered Nichols left $20,000 in $100 bills in a bag behind a drawer in her house here.
She also alleged that Nichols left a key to a storage facility where she discovered an undetermined number of gold bullions stashed away together with some personal belongings of her husband.
She said she suspected her husband hid these bullions and money but could not say exactly where.
Barbers called the testimony a “very serious and risky allegation,” which required the government’s close attention and monitoring.
“There is a need for our embassy officials in the US to check into the truthfulness of Padilla’s testimony because she may be just creating her own tales since there were also reports that the District Judge admonished her for being evasive and not truthful with her answers,” Barbers said.
Barbers suspected that the money and gold were turned over to some local contacts here and it would be prudent to determine the veracity of such possibility.
He said before the September 11 attacks, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the most serious terrorist attack committed on US soil and it would be impossible to accomplish such feat without a terrorist network helping them out.
“It is not just to determine who benefited from the money and the gold bullion but the same resources could have financed terrorist attacks here in the country,” Barbers said.
(May 11, 2003 issue)
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