OU Bomb Case -- Roundup on Day 5

Our gut feeling is that it is not in good taste but a few posters have taken to calling the OU bombing investigation the "Boomer Sooner" case.

Day 5 shows the traditional press getting a bit more interested in the investigation now that it seems to be going somewhere.

Hot items today:

• An off-duty Norman police officer actually witnessed the attempted fertilizer purchase earlier last week, called in a license tag check and filed an investigations report identifying Joel Hinrichs III.
• A bus driver may have been the last person to see Hinrichs alive, and in a written statement transmitted to a Washington, D.C., blogger (with Oklahoma ties) thanks God, and a whistled hymn, for sparing his life. He also says he was told by the FBI not to discuss details of what he saw.
• The blogger, Mark Tapscott of Tapscotts Copy Desk, also had detailed information on the contents of Hinrichs' Lincoln Town Car which, oddly enough, was still parked in the open garage of the apartments where Hinrichs lived with one or more Middle Eastern men. It had not, as of this morning, been impounded. The contents included 13 plastic bottles, contents unknown, if any.
  

Michelle Malkin also has various links and updates to the OU blast case.

Tapscott identifies himself as director of the Heritage Foundation's Center for Media and Public Policy. He's definitely not a tin foil hat guy.

Rusty Shackleford -- the Jawa Report guy -- has reversed his earlier skepticism of some of the reporting and, in a point by point analysis of what is now known, makes a case that Hinrichs is the first "suicide bomber" in America since 9/11. Read the whole thing, but we cite, in part:

As more details become public about suicide bomber Joel Henry Hinrichs III, who blew himself up outside of a University of Oklahoma football game last Saturday, more and more evidence suggests that he may actually have been part of a larger plot.

Earlier reports indicated that Hinrichs had Islamic jihad material in his apartment that referenced bomb-making manuals. We downplayed that fact as not really evidence of a wider plot. After all, if you want to blow yourself up why not consult with the experts--Islamic terrorists?

But other facts have come to light which raise suspicions.
...

1) Hinrichs seems to have converted to Islam and attended a nearby Islamic center. (see map at Zombietime) However, the president of the University of Oklahoma Muslim Studeant Association denies that Hinrichs was a Muslim. Other witnesses, though, claim Hinrichs was a frequent visitor to the mosque.

2) It appears that the Islamic center is affiliated with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a group with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and which has been investigated for funding terrorism by Congress.
...
4) Hinrichs' roomate, Fazal M. Cheema, was a Pakistani national and neighbors claim the apartment was a center of activity for Middle Easterners. He is described as a 'really nice guy' by his friends. Unfortunately, all terrorists are described this way by their friends. NEIN now reports that Cheema and his associates may have been on the FBI's terror watch list.
...
7) Evidence at the scene of the bombing suggests that shrapenel was part of the bomb. This is a strong indication that Hinrichs planned to kill more than himself.
...

9) Northeast Intelligence Network, who's earlier reports we had dismissed because of that website's long track record of alarmism but who are increasingly looking like they got this one right, claims a source is telling them:

It appears that HINRICHS was part of a larger plan that included members of an Islamic terrorist cell based in and around the Norman and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma area. As a Caucasian, it was much easier for him to obtain the materials needed to create a large bomb, act in concert with members of the local terrorist cell, and strike when relative calm was the word of the day.

All of this evidence suggests that there may have been a wider plot by Islamic terrorists to use Joel Henry Hinrichs III as a suicide bomber in exactly the same way as terrorists use suicide bombers around the world: to kill civilians. Hinrichs, like so many other suicide bombers, failed in his attempt and killed only himself. A word of caution is necessary here. It is definitely possible that Hinrichs did act alone and was just a sad nut with a death wish.

If he was, then he went to a lot of trouble to do something fairly simple. Gateway Pundit received a summary of various suicide data on Americans, none of it including anything like the Norman case.

UPDATE -- Mark Tapscott raises a good question. What if Joel Hinrichs was being blackmailed, or coerced, to cooperate with a terrorist operation?

Was Hinrichs Begging to be Arrested at the Feed Store?

Think about it: Hinrichs wore a vest with pockets obviously full and with a wire visible as he is in a feed store in Oklahoma asking about buying a substance that everybody in the state knows was used to blow up the Murrah Building in 1995?

Maybe Hinrichs wasn't simply acting thoughtlessly. Could he have been trying to make himself such an obvious threat that he would be arrested and thus prevented from doing something he was being blackmailed into doing, namely blowing up himself and a bunch of OU football fans? Maybe he was protecting his family from threatened retaliation which is characteristic of terrorist outfits in Iraq and elsewhere.

Far-fetched maybe but not so much that it isn't possible, given the evidence discovered so far.

We add one other thought: what if Hinrichs vest had a receiver designed to receive a detonation signal? These have been used in Iraq and London, and they are not that difficult to build. Perhaps the coercion was a more direct threat on his own life.

MORE TO COME ... obviously.