Severest of sentences for the gravest of crimes, says Bush

Timothy McVeigh had faced the "severest of sentences for the gravest of crimes", President Bush told journalists following yesterday's execution. "It was not vengeance but justice," he said.

Not so, said Mr Bud Welch, whose daughter died in the Oklahoma bombing and who has become a passionate opponent of the death penalty. Speaking from Terre Haute, Indiana, he denounced what he called the "circus" which had ensured that "six years after the bombing no one has been able to move forward".

In a moving denunciation of the death penalty, McVeigh's lawyer, Mr Robert Nigh, insisted that there "are reasonable ways to deal with crimes this dire not involving killing another human being".

He thanked those of the relatives, like Mr Welch, who had been able to demonstrate real compassion at the most difficult of times and expressed his sorrow that he had failed to persuade McVeigh to express remorse for the bombing.

He appealed for support for the death penalty moratorium movement. Even in the McVeigh case, he said, referring to the FBI's failure to turn over evidence until days before the execution, the state had not been able to carry out the death penalty in a fair manner.

"If there is anything good that can come from the execution of Tim McVeigh, it may be to help us realise sooner that we simply cannot do this any more," Mr Nigh said. "We are too fallible, too human to extract so final a punishment."

Another of McVeigh's former lawyers said "there was too much self-congratulation today" and warned that not all the perpetrators had been brought to justice.

But Mr Bush undoubtedly caught the country's unforgiving mood in insisting that while such "tragedies cannot be explained, they can be redeemed". He spoke of good overcoming evil, of how McVeigh had "met the fate he chose for himself six years ago".

"For the survivors of the crime and for the families of the dead, the pain goes on. Final punishment of the guilty cannot alone bring peace for the innocent. It cannot recover the loss or balance the scales and it is not meant to do so.

"Today every living person who was hurt by the evil done in Oklahoma City can rest in the knowledge that there has been a reckoning," Mr Bush said.