Oklahoma City National Memorial

Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum - darkometer rating : 6 - The site of the worst terrorist attack in the USA prior to 9/11 . The target in the centre of Oklahoma City was a state government building which was half blown up by an enormous home-made truck bomb in 1995. The site has been converted into a large memorial ensemble and a state-of-the-art memorial museum is directly adjacent. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum is a one-of-kind site – not only due to the scale of the atrocity that happened here, also for its political significance. Before 9/11 , the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was the worst terrorist attack to hit the USA . The building was blown up by a massive "home-made" bomb, based on over two tons of fertilizer and other explosives, placed in a rental truck parked outside the building and detonated by time-delay fuse. The blast caused the whole front of the building to collapse, and 168 people were killed, including some 20 children in a day-care centre within the building, and hundreds more were injured. Unlike 9/11, the Oklahoma bombing constituted entirely "internal" terrorism in more than one sense: firstly, the perpetrators were Americans, and secondly the reason was also an inner-American affair. The bombing was apparently carried out as an act of retaliation for the Waco disaster – when government forces laid siege to the Branch Davidians' sect compound in Waco, Texas, which resulted in a fire killing around 80 people exactly two years previously on 19 April 1993.