October 24, 2001	Wednesday	Shaba'an 6, 1422

NEW YORK, Oct 23: The United States has signed an agreement with Uzbekistan to remove deadly anthrax from a remote island in the Aral Sea where the Soviet Union dumped tons of lethal spores, Bush administration and Uzbek officials said on Monday.

They said the agreement reflected growing concern that terrorists or rogue states might seek to obtain the anthrax spores, which the Soviet Union secretly buried on the island in 1988. A report in the New York Times said that the Pentagon had approved a project to make a potentially more potent form of anthrax bacteria to see if the vaccine the United States intends to supply to its armed forces is effective against that strain as well.

Russian scientists say they first made the superbug in the early 1990’s. In 1997, the scientists say, the genetically engineered germ appeared to defeat Russia’s own vaccine, at least in hamsters. The project, run by the Defence Intelligence Agency, was delayed for weeks as Pentagon lawyers debated whether the research violated the 1972 germ treaty banning biological weapons that the United States helped champion.

Officials said on Monday that the Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved the work last week after lawyers for the Pentagon and other agencies concluded that the project was, in fact, “fully consistent” with the germ treaty.

Administration officials said that both projects, whose details they declined to discuss publicly, were part of American efforts to deal with the legacy of the Soviet Union’s vast germ warfare programme. Even after the germ treaty took effect, tens of thousands of Soviet scientists and technicians in secret labs throughout the former empire worked at turning germs into weapons.

The agreements, officials added, also reflect President Bush’s determination to bolster the nation’s biological warfare defences in the wake of a spate of letters containing anthrax spores, which have killed at least one person, in Florida, and sickened several others.

Uzbek and American officials said the agreement between the Pentagon and its Uzbek counterpart to clean up the island, Vozrozhdeniye, or Renaissance, was signed the other day by a Pentagon official in Tashkent.

Under the accord, the United States will spend up to 6 million dollars dismantling the former Soviet germ-warfare test site on Vozrozhdeniye, removing the buried anthrax and decontaminating the island. In addition, Washington has pledged to help Tashkent upgrade security at its research institutes and other sites where deadly germs and toxins are stored.

In an interview with the NYT , Sodyq Safaev, Uzbekistan’s deputy foreign minister, who is visiting Washington, called the agreement both timely and wise.

“Today everyone understands how important it is to combat biological weapons,” Safaev said. The anthrax on the island, he said, threatened the world because “not only rats and animals might be able to reach this material, but terrorists.”

“All countries should help rid us of this potential threat,” he said.

Until the Russian military abandoned the island in 1992, it was the Soviet Union’s major open-air biological testing site. Shared by the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the island today is the world’s largest anthrax burial ground.

At the invitation of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, American military scientists and intelligence experts began travelling to the island in 1997 to survey it and take samples of bacteria.

The Soviets buried the anthrax here after a deadly accident at one of their germ plants provoked alarm in the West. The American survey teams found that anthrax spores in soil samples from 6 of the 11 burial pits were still alive and potentially deadly.

Ken Alibek, a defector from the Soviet germ warfare programme, said the Soviets had used the island to test germs like tularemia, Q-fever, brucellosis, glanders and plague beginning in the 1970’s.

Other studies say Soviet military labs also tested typhus, botulinum toxin, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, smallpox, and microbial strains with characteristics useful in warfare, like high virulence and resistance to ultraviolet rays or heat, the paper said.