
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, February 16, 1991                   TAG: 9102160307
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

BOMB PLOT SUSPECTS COMING BACK TO VA.

A federal magistrate Friday in Phoenix ordered two Arizona men transferred to the custody of federal officials in Norfolk, Va., for trial in an alleged plot to blow up chemical tanks and collect the insurance.

Cecil Howard Ross, 31, of Glendale and Joseph Wayne Openshaw, 36, of St. Johns are accused of conspiracy to commit a bombing to further a wire fraud or mail fraud. The charge carries maximum penalties of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The two allegedly supplied Charles Edward Gresham Jr., 57, of Ellicott City, Md., the man identified as the plot originator, with diagrams and materials to make pipe bombs and with documentation of a non-existent sale of an industrial chemical to a Chinese company.

The case came to light Feb. 4, when an employee of Allied Terminals Inc. found a pipe bomb attached to a tank of explosive methanol and several more bombs in "a golf-type bag" near the inflow-outflow manifolds on an adjacent tank which Gresham was leasing.

- Associated Press

by CNB