BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Emily Lyons never gave up hope that the man who set off the bomb that left her blind in one eye, unable to work and facing a lifetime of operations, would someday be caught.

Her reaction when a friend called to tell her that bombing suspect Eric Robert Rudolph had been arrested in the mountains of North Carolina was a mixture of joy and relief.

“I jumped up and down. I kept saying ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it,” Lyons said.

Lyons was critically injured and off-duty police officer Robert “Sande” Sanderson was killed in the Jan. 29, 1998, bombing at the New Woman All Women Health Clinic in Birmingham, the last of a series of bombings linked to Rudolph.

Federal charges have also been filed against Rudolph in the 1996 bombing at Atlanta’s crowded Olympic park. The explosion injured 111 people and killed Alice Hawthorne, a 44-year-old Georgia woman who brought her teenage daughter to the park.

Rudolph was also charged with bombing a gay nightclub in Atlanta and an office building north of Atlanta in 1997.

Beverly McMahon owned the Atlanta nightclub that Rudolph was suspected of bombing six years ago.

“This is the shocker,” she said. “I just knew he was out there. I always thought they’d catch him.”

The 62-year-old mother of two said she has struggled with paranoia since a bomb rocked The Otherside Lounge, whose clientele is mostly gay and lesbian. The lounge was crowded with about 150 people when the nail-packed device exploded in a rear patio in late February 1997.

“It’s always like you have someone on your back,” McMahon said. “You’re always wondering, ‘Why me?””

Lyons had just arrived for work at the Birmingham women’s clinic, the site of many anti-abortion demonstrations, and was apparently talking with Sanderson outside the clinic when the bomb sprayed hundreds of nails and bits of shrapnel into her face and body.

In the past five years, she has had 20 surgeries and there are still nails in her legs.

“You don’t have to go to the Middle East to find terrorists. Rudolph is one of them,” Lyons said.

The Food and Drug Administration’s refusal to approve an alternative drug Rudolph believed would help fight his father’s cancer caused him to hate the government and associate with extremist groups, a key investigator said.

Rudolph was 10 or 11 when his father sought use of laetrile, a concoction of ground apricot pits, to fight his cancer, but the United States government for three decades has banned use of it in this country.

The family eventually obtained the drug in Mexico, but by then it was too late and Rudolph’s father died.

“That formed the basis for his hatred of the government; it was just about hatred,” said Charles Stone, a retired George Bureau of Investigation agent who was assigned to the bombing task force that hunted Rudolph. “The anti-abortion, antigay thing was a smokescreen.”

Stone said Rudolph, as a teenager in the late 1970s, moved to Missouri with his mother. It was there and in North Carolina later, Stone said, that Rudolph’s hatred of the government was fostered by extremist groups. He was embraced by followers of Christian Identity, a white supremacist religion that is antigay, anti-Semitic and anti-foreigner.