The jury is considering the evidence in the trial of Terry Nichols, the second suspect accused of bombing a US government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people.

Mr Nichols' former Army associate, Timothy McVeigh, was convicted in June 1997 on 11 murder and conspiracy charges and was sentenced to death for his role in the bombing. He is appealing against his conviction.

The jury of seven men and five women will be considering the evidence of almost 200 witnesses. They will have to decide if they believe the prosecution who claim that Terry Nichols conspired with Timothy McVeigh to gather the components of the Oklahoma city bomb.

Nichols faces the same 11 charges as McVeigh, and if found guilty, could also be sentenced to death.

The charges accuse Mr Nichols of robbing a gun dealer to raise money for the bombing and helping to stow a getaway car in Oklahoma City. The prosecution also maintains that he helped McVeigh assemble the giant bomb.

In the final day of the trial, prosecutors tried to prove that the pair built the device together in a Ryder truck at Geary Lake State Park in Kansas, the day before the bombing.

To cast doubt on this key point, the defence offered an array of witnesses who said they saw the Ryder truck, but not Nichols.

Legal experts praised the defence mounted by attorneys for the accused, but said that the mountain of evidence against Nichols remained daunting.

"The defence's strengths were in presenting alternatives to the jury. They were able to divert and dilute the government's case," said Andrew Cohen, a Denver attorney who has closely followed the case.

Nichols' lawyers attempted to present Nichols as a man focused on his family, rather than obsessed with abuses of governmental power.

Nichols' 24-year-old Philippine-born wife Marife was called as the defence's last witness.

His wife could not give her husband an alibi for critical moments, and putting her on the stand may have been a mistake, according to Andrew Cohen.

The prosecution had previously accepted that Mr Nichols was at home with his family in Kansas when the explosion occurred.

In the course of the trial, the government has produced weighty circumstantial and physical evidence against Nichols, including telephone records linking him to McVeigh's scheme and sales receipts that allegedly show Nichols bought two tonnes of ammonium nitrate - the fertiliser used to build the powerful bomb - under a fake name.

Defence lawyers say the two men were business associates who sold military surplus goods at gun shows and used aliases to elude dissatisfied customers.

Nichols' lawyers have also contended that some of the evidence is unreliable because government agents dealt with it improperly.
 

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