October 20, 2001	Saturday	Shaba'an 2, 1422

NEW YORK, Oct 19: US government scientists examining the anthrax used in the Florida and New York attacks have tentatively concluded that the type is a domestic strain similar to a highly virulent type known as the Ames strain, which was discovered in Iowa in 1980. The Ames strain is now used in labs around the world.

The US law enforcement officials investigating the outbreak of Anthrax outbreak cases in New York, Washington and Florida said on Thursday that they are looking into the possibility of Al Qaeda networks involvement behind the incidents following Sept 11 attacks.

However, law enforcement and intelligence officials told the New York Times that they lacked concrete evidence or intelligence to explain who sent the anthrax-contaminated letters to news organizations in New York and to the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, in Washington, and whether they all contained the same type of anthrax.

The letter sent to Senator Daschle and another to NBC were postmarked from Trenton, and officials have said the letters were written by the same person. Several hijackers lived in New Jersey before taking over the United Airlines flight from Newark that slammed into a field in rural Pennsylvania.

The Times said that the federal investigators said that they believed that the letter sent to Tom Brokaw was mailed from West Trenton, a neighbourhood in the Trenton suburb of Ewing, and they have narrowed their search for the specific mailbox to a one-square-mile section of that neighbourhood.

A letter carrier who officials said on Thursday was infected with anthrax was assigned to deliver and collect mail on a route in West Trenton that covered 250 to 500 homes and businesses, and it is that route that investigators now believe was the source of the letter.

Senior government officials told the NYT that investigators were focusing on the ability of the hijackers or their accomplices to obtain highly refined anthrax from a foreign or domestic supplier.

While they have not ruled out the possibility that another criminal could be behind the anthrax attacks, investigators are looking intensely at evidentiary threads linking the letters to the hijackers. Investigators are focusing on Mohammed Atta, a hijacking ringleader, who was interested in crop-dusting aircraft and once lived near the offices in Boca Raton, Florida, of American Media Inc., where the first victims worked, the paper said.

The paper said that on Thursday, FBI agents also searched the Jersey City home of three men who have been in custody since last month because of a possible connection to the hijackings.

Investigators may have overlooked them in an earlier search. Two of the men who lived there, Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Azmath, both Indian nationals, boarded a flight from Newark Airport to San Antonio on the morning of Sept. 11, but the plane was forced to land in St. Louis after hijackings of four other flights forced all air traffic in the country to a halt. They were arrested the next day.