Atlanta Olympic bombing suspect Eric Robert Rudolph -- wanted in bombings that killed two people and injured more than 100 in the Southeast over the last five years -- was arrested early Saturday, in western North Carolina.
J.S. Postell, a rookie police officer in Murphy, N.C., found Rudolph behind a shopping center going through a garbage dumpster, shortly before 4 a.m.
Rudolph ran when Postell got out of his car, but then stopped when Postell pulled his weapon and ordered him to halt.
Later Saturday morning, an FBI source in Washington confirmed the fingerprints of the man Postell arrested matched those of Rudolph.
A former sheriff who saw Rudolph being questioned told CNN, “He just seemed relieved, and it seemed like he was cooperating.”
Rudolph has been charged in the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, 1997 bombings at a gay nightclub and a clinic that performed abortions in the Atlanta area, as well as the 1998 bombing at a clinic in Birmingham, Ala.
Both the women’s clinic and nightclub bombings involved secondary bombs designed to go off later than the first, after law enforcement personnel had arrived on the scene.
Off-duty police officer Robert Sanderson, was killed in the Birmingham clinic bombing.
Seven people were hurt in the second bomb at the clinic; authorities found the second bomb at the nightclub and disabled it.
If convicted, Rudolph could face the death penalty.
Rudolph, now 36, had eluded law officers for five years, despite a massive search in the North Carolina mountains that involved hundreds of law enforcement officers and cost millions of dollars. The Southeast Bomb Task Force -- formed to investigate the bombings -- kept a presence in the area, at times with as many as 200 federal agents combing a 500,000 acre mountainous and heavily-wooded area.
The last known sighting of Rudolph was in July 1998, when he tried to buy food and supplies from health food store owner. In a statement Saturday, Attorney General John Ashcroft called Rudolph “the most notorious American fugitive on the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ list. This sends a clear message that we will never cease in our efforts to hunt down all terrorists, foreign or domestic, and stop them from harming the innocent.”