DATE SET FOR JURY SELECTION IN MCVEIGH'S TRIAL.

Byline: The New York Times

Jury selection in the trial of Timothy McVeigh, one of two men charged in the Oklahoma City bombing, will begin on March 31, almost two years after the blast that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 people. McVeigh's co-defendant, Terry Nichols, will stand trial afterward.

Joseph Hartzler, the lead federal prosecutor, made the announcement shortly after lunch Friday to a crowd of reporters and photographers huddled around him in a cloud of falling snow. When the hearings were moved here in April from Oklahoma City, the usual outdoor attire was T-shirts and suntans.

Hartzler did not say how long he thought jury selection would take, and he declined to speculate on the date for opening arguments. Many pretrial issues, including the designation of the jury pool, remain to be worked out.

Friday's announcement capped three days of hearings this week in which the prosecution and defense tried to work out their differences on matters of discovery, with Judge Richard Matsch of U.S. District Court urging them to move things along as quickly as possible.

The dimensions of the government's case against the two defendants are daunting, lawyers on both sides agree, even though only a fraction of it will be introduced at trial. There are 25,000 witness statements; 5,000 pieces of physical evidence; 160,000 documents that include telephone records and satellite photographs; 500 hours of videotape from security cameras and automatic teller machines; and more audio tape than anyone involved in the case has time to hear.

And still there is the concern, more readily voiced in public by lawyers for the defense than for the prosecution, that this mountain of material may yet hide some clue to the involvement of others, as yet unidentified, in the nation's worst terrorist crime ever.

Though the government's investigation continues, prosecutors do not want to jeopardize what they believe to be a strong case. But lawyers for the defense are still looking for evidence, which the government says it does not have, that the April 15, 1995, bombing was committed by someone else.

Disputes over evidence have resulted in lengthy delays, with prosecutors accusing the lawyer for McVeigh, Stephen Jones, of making requests that are ``speculative'' and ``overbroad,'' and Jones accusing prosecutors of ``unconscionable delays'' in giving him the material he seeks.

In meetings with bombing victims in Oklahoma City on Oct. 27 and 28, Hartzler took aim at what he called ``wacky theories'' in the case. In court Friday, he said he had called Jones after the meetings to assure him that it was not Jones' theories to which he referred.

``There has been a theory the government bombed its own building,'' Hartzler told the court Friday, ``that the ATF'' - the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms - ``had prior knowledge and involvement.'' It was those theories, he said, that he wanted to put to rest.