WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) -- Attorney General John Ashcroft said Monday the Justice Department would seek to have Atlanta Olympic bombing suspect Eric Rudolph tried first in Alabama, where a trial is expected to be "relatively short and straightforward."
Rudolph is suspected in four bombings, including a 1998 blast at a women's clinic in Birmingham, Ala., that killed an off-duty police officer.
After the Alabama trial, the department will try Rudolph in Georgia.
Rudolph, one of the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" fugitives, was arrested in the mountain village of Murphy, N.C., early Saturday morning by a lone police officer.
Rudolph had been on the run for years, apparently hiding in the remote mountainous area. Despite a $1 million reward, investigators suspect he was helped by local sympathizers, though they do not say so publicly.
The fugitive was often described in published reports as a "survivalist" who was capable of living the mountains on his own for some time.
The Washington Post reported Monday that some officials believe Rudolph is part of the Christian Identity movement, a radical group that believes Northern European whites are the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.
Rudolph has been indicted twice -- the 1996 Olympic bombing in Atlanta in which a woman was killed and more than 100 people were injured, and the Birmingham bombing.
The Atlanta indictment also cites the 1997 bombing of a city lesbian bar that injured five people. A second bomb was found and detonated at the scene.
He is also suspected in the 1997 bombing of an abortion clinic in the Atlanta area.
In the Atlanta Olympic and Birmingham clinic bombs, "two people were killed and over 150 innocent people were injured," Ashcroft said in his statement Monday.
The FBI, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as well as local law enforcement officers from several states searched for him for seven years, and "never yielded, they never stopped looking, they kept up the pressure and never gave up hope," Ashcroft said.
Monday "morning the Department of Justice will ask the court in western North Carolina to remove Eric Robert Rudolph to the Northern District of Alabama to face trial for the Birmingham clinic bombing," Ashcroft added. "We expect that trial to be relatively short and straightforward."
The attorney general said when that trial is completed, "Rudolph will be transferred to the Northern District of Georgia to face the more complicated trial involving the three bombings there. Our approach is designed to provide the best opportunity to bring justice to all of the victims of the bombings, and to each community that experienced these terrorist attacks."
The Justice Department is expected to ask for the death penalty in at least one of Rudolph's trials, but Ashcroft did not address that issue in Monday's statement.
