A piece from today's NYT about the anthrax letter situation, including some profiling info.:
November 17, 2001
THE DISEASE
Suspicious Letter to Senator Tests Positive
for Anthrax
By PHILIP SHENON
ASHINGTON, Nov. 16 ?
Investigators searching through
unopened mail sent to Capitol Hill
discovered another letter today that
contained anthrax. The letter was addressed
to Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation said.
The bureau said that the letter was
postmarked on Oct. 9 in Trenton and that it was found this evening among
the more than 250 barrels of unopened Congressional mail impounded after
a letter containing anthrax spores was opened last month in the offices of
Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader.
Investigators said a preliminary test of the envelope, which had not been
irradiated to kill microbes, showed that it contained anthrax. A law
enforcement official said the letter to Mr. Leahy, a Democrat who is
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had the same fictitious return
address as the Daschle letter: "4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park,
NJ."
In a statement, the F.B.I. said the letter to Senator Leahy "appears in every
respect to be similar to other anthrax-laced letters" received by Mr. Daschle,
NBC News and The New York Post.
The other three letters were all mailed from Trenton, were handwritten in
childlike block letters that tilted to the right and were dated Sept. 11, the day
of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The
date appeared in the three letters as 09-11-01. The letters were all
postmarked after Sept. 11.
A senior federal law enforcement official said the discovery of an
anthrax-tainted letter to Senator Leahy would tend to support the suspicion
of F.B.I. investigators that a domestic terrorist was behind the anthrax
attacks.
"No disrespect to Senator Leahy," the official said, "but I don't know how
many foreign terrorists would want to single out the chairman of a
Congressional committee. They would have other targets."
Since the anthrax attacks began, four people have died from inhalation
anthrax, including two Washington postal workers, and six others have
contracted the disease. At least seven people have contracted skin anthrax, a
much less serious form of the illness that does not necessarily require
hospitalization.
Senator Leahy's personal office is in the Russell Senate Office Building,
which is a block from Senator Daschle's personal office in the Hart Senate
Office Building, where his staff received and opened the anthrax-tainted
letter last month. Some members of Mr. Daschle's staff were exposed to
anthrax, and the Hart building was found to be contaminated with spores in
several places. It remains closed as biohazard teams continue to clean it.
Tonight, the Capitol police said the Russell and Dirksen Senate Office
Buildings would be closed on a precautionary basis beginning on Saturday so
they could be tested again for anthrax. Congress recessed today for
Thanksgiving and is due to reconvene on Nov. 27, though staff members
would be working in those buildings during the recess.
Both the Russell and Dirksen buildings were checked for anthrax after the
initial discovery of the letter to Senator Daschle, and a small amount was
discovered in the mailroom of the Dirksen building, which adjoins the Hart
building. The area was disinfected.
Postal investigators have said for days that they assumed that more mail
containing anthrax would be found as investigators sifted through the tons of
impounded mail from Capitol Hill, a variety of federal agencies and the
Brentwood postal station in Washington, where the Daschle letter was
processed.
The search of the unopened Congressional mail began earlier this week at a
facility in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington. Officials said that
F.B.I. and Postal Service investigators in biohazard suits would continue
searching through the mail for several more days in the expectation that more
contaminated mail would be found.
In a statement, Senator Leahy said he was informed immediately of the
letter's discovery this evening.
"This is a law enforcement matter," he said, "and I will leave it to the proper
authorities to report what they know and the procedures they are taking. I
am confident they are taking the appropriate steps and that eventually they
will find this person."
A spokeswoman said no one on Mr. Leahy's staff had reported suspicious
health problems.
Tom Ridge, the director of the Office of Homeland Security at the White
House, said through a spokeswoman that he "was relieved that the F.B.I.
had acted quickly to quarantine the mail after the Daschle letter was found"
on Oct. 15 and that as a result, "this letter does not pose a health hazard to
anybody."
While trace amounts of anthrax spores have been found in recent days in
small post offices that processed some of the deadly letters, law enforcement
officials have suggested that the bioterrorism threat may be subsiding, even
as they continue to express frustration about the hunt for those responsible.
F.B.I. analysts have said that their best guess was that the terrorist was most
likely a man who worked in a laboratory or had a scientific background. If
employed, the analysts said, he probably had little contact with the public
and was comfortable working with extremely hazardous material. Hundreds
of laboratories around the country are reported to keep anthrax.
Searching through the mountains of impounded mail is proving to be a
monumental task for the F.B.I. and the Postal Service.
Investigators have segregated much of the mail to Congress in the highly
secure sorting facility in Northern Virginia. It will not be irradiated
immediately to kill anthrax microbes in the hope that investigators ? wearing
biohazard suits and gas masks ? will find additional, live spores in some of
the mail that could help them track down the sender. Tons of other, less
suspicious mail from the Brentwood postal station has been trucked to Ohio
for irradiation. |
