Fugitive Faces Olympic Bomb Charges

Forget about habeas corpus. The FBI plans to charge Eric Robert Rudolph with the 1996 Olympic bombing in Atlanta, even though he's eluded their dragnet for almost nine months without straying far from his backyard. Rudolph is also wanted for an attack on an Alabama abortion clinic in which an off-duty policeman was killed, but the feds hope the new charges will smoke him out of his North Carolina mountain hideout. "Investigators hope that the new charges will make any antiabortion fanatics who may be helping Rudolph back off," says TIME Atlanta bureau reporter Tim Roche.

The FBI claims to have forensic evidence linking Rudolph to the Olympic attack and the bombing of an Atlanta gay bar. A Nashville couple that sells ammunition at gun shows has told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that they believe they sold Rudolph the gunpowder used in the Atlanta attack. The idea that the additional charges will succeed where a $1 million reward, a 200-person task force and the intervention of militia leader James "Bo" Gritz failed may seem like wishful thinking, but it's not as if the FBI has much else to go on.