On this day in conspiracies

With hostility rising, Chinese community representatives in Mexico publish a letter in the newspaper El Tiempo, calmly rebutting the accusations circulating against them. As the writer Julián Herbert notes, twenty-four days later hundreds of them would be dead.

Around 10:30 p.m., 17-year-old Bill Bartlett is driving on Farm Street in Dover, Massachusetts, with two friends when his headlights catch a small creature on a low stone wall: roughly 3 to 4 feet, hairless, with an oversized watermelon-shaped head, large glowing orange eyes, no visible nose or mouth, and long thin limbs whose fingers seem to grip the stones. He drives on, shaken, and sketches it at home, writing on the drawing that he swears on a stack of Bibles he saw the creature.

Just as McVeigh is about to make bail on the traffic and weapons charges, he is identified as the bombing suspect and held. Terry Nichols surrenders to police in Herington, Kansas. The FBI releases sketches of two suspects: John Doe 1, resembling McVeigh, and John Doe 2, a second man described by witnesses at the Kansas body shop where the truck was rented.

On Easter Sunday, near-simultaneous suicide bombings tear through three churches and three luxury hotels, killing roughly 269 people, among them dozens of children and foreign nationals, and wounding hundreds more. The Islamic State claims the attack; investigators tie it to the local National Thowheeth Jama'ath and its leader, Zahran Hashim.

Coordinated suicide bombings claimed by Islamic State strike three churches and three luxury hotels on Easter Sunday, killing about 269 people. The attacks trigger fear and a wave of hostility toward Sri Lanka's Muslim minority, roughly a tenth of the population, even though the bombers were a fringe cell repudiated by mainstream Muslim organizations.

CNN reports that the deaths and disappearances have drawn attention from federal officials. Coverage stresses that the cited cases span years and involve circumstances that are already documented and unrelated to one another.