PROSECUTION LAUNCHES NICHOLS CASE.

Byline: Jo Thomas The New York Times

Terry Nichols worked ``side by side'' with Timothy McVeigh to prepare the bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, prosecutors charged Monday, as they opened their case against him before a federal court jury here.

But Nichols' lawyer said his client had nothing to do with the bomb plot and had merely been trapped by the deceit of his friend McVeigh and by a web of misleading circumstantial evidence.

Larry Mackey, the lead prosecutor, told jurors the deceit was all on the part of Nichols.

When the bomb went off at 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, Terry Nichols was at home in Kansas, ``home and at a very safe distance,'' Mackey said. ``Terry Nichols had planned it just that way.''

While Mackey did not accuse Nichols of joining McVeigh on his trip to Oklahoma City to detonate the bomb, he said Nichols was actively involved plotting the attack and building the bomb.

McVeigh was convicted on identical charges of murder and conspiracy in June and sentenced to death by Judge Richard P. Matsch of Federal District Court, who also is presiding over this trial.

The case outlined by Mackey on Monday will be far broader than the case against McVeigh and will include evidence not previously disclosed.

Prosecutors are expected to present evidence about the bomb's construction and about a robbery in Arkansas that they say helped finance the plot. Another new accusation is that McVeigh and Nichols got together shortly after McVeigh arrived in Kansas on April 13, six days before the bombing. In McVeigh's trial, prosecutors had only presented telephone records which showed that the two men had talked in those days before the bombing.

When Nichols was first interviewed by agents for the FBI on April 21, two days after the bombing, Mackey said, he told them that he had not heard from McVeigh for months before receiving a telephone call from him April 16, Easter Sunday.

Nichols, who was living in Herington, a small town south of Fort Riley where the two men had been stationed together in the Army, told the FBI that he had written his old friend a letter at his address in Kingman, Ariz., months earlier. In it, he asked him to pick up a television set from Nichols' former wife, Lana Padilla, who was living in Las Vegas, a short distance from Kingman, and bring it to Kansas the next time he came, Mackey said.

On Easter, Nichols said, McVeigh called from Oklahoma City to say he had the television but his car had broken down. Nichols said he went to pick him up.

Monday, Mackey said the government would produce a receipt for an oil filter purchased by McVeigh at a Wal-Mart in Arkansas City, Kansas, near the Oklahoma state line, shortly before 6 p.m. April 13. McVeigh had checked out of his Kingman motel room the day before, driving hard, and his 1983 Pontiac station wagon was having engine trouble by the time he got to Kansas.

On the following day, however, when McVeigh arrived at a Firestone store in Junction City, Kansas, said Mackey, smoke was pouring out of the engine and McVeigh exchanged his ruined car and $250 for a 1977 Mercury Marquis, purchased from the manager of the store.

McVeigh then had no use for the new oil filter, Mackey said, and Nichols tried to return it to a local Wal-Mart on April 15. The receipt was found in Nichols' wallet. On it were two fingerprints: one from Nichols and one from McVeigh.