Investigators play down Osama link: Anthrax attacks
By Our Staff Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Oct 27: Top investigators believe that the anthrax attacks on Washington, New York and Florida that have held America in thrall for the past fortnight are likely to be the work of one or more extremists in the United States who are probably not connected to the Al Qaeda.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Postal Inspection Service are considering a wide range of domestic possibilities, “including associates of right-wing hate groups and residents in this country sympathetic to the cause of Islamic extremists”. But there are no clear suspects.
Reporting this on Saturday, the Washington Post said none of the 60 to 80 threat reports gathered daily by US intelligence agencies has connected the envelopes containing anthrax spores to Al Qaeda or any of the known organizations considered to be terrorist.
The officials are concerned that the bioterrorism fear is “diverting public attention from the larger threat posed by (Osama) bin Laden and his network, who are believed to be planning a second wave of attacks against US interests here or abroad that could come at any time”.
The anthrax scare forced the US supreme court to close its doors for the first time in 66 years on Friday. The detection of anthrax-contaminated mail has previously led to the closure of the House of Representatives, and officials believe one more polluted envelope is circulating somewhere in the postal system.
Three people have so far died after being infected by anthrax, and thousands have been tested. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also sealed off its mail facility at Langley on Friday.
It has been speculated that the anthrax strains detected and tested so far could have been made in a laboratory.
The Washington Post story quotes one senior official as saying: “Everything seems to lean toward a domestic source. Nothing seems to fit with an overseas terrorist type operation.”
Federal health officials said on Friday a new case of pulmonary anthrax in a man who worked at a State Department mail facility in Virginia has persuaded them that more than one contaminated letter may have been sent to the Washington area.
Health experts previously believed that a single letter sent to the office of Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle likely caused all the anthrax cases in the Washington area as it came in contact with other pieces of mail in the system.
According to the Post, although there is consensus at the FBI and CIA that al Qaeda associates are planning more serious attacks, ‘nobody believes the anthrax scare we are going through is’ the next wave of terrorism, one senior official said. ‘There is no intelligence on it and it does not fit any [al Qaeda] pattern’.
One official told the Post the only significant clue raising the possibility of foreign terrorist involvement was the conclusion of FBI behavioural scientists, who believe that whoever wrote the three letters delivered to Daschle, NBC News and the New York Post did not learn English as a first language. But the writer could have lived in this country for some time, and the other evidence gathered so far points away from a foreign source., several officials said.
The anti-Israel message in the anthrax letters and bin Laden’s statements, the Post says, are echoed by US extremist groups, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the Post adds. One group, Aryan Action, praises the Sept. 11 attacks on its Web site and declares: “Either you’re fighting with the Jews against al Qaeda, or you support al Qaeda fighting against the Jews.” Cooper said a meeting this year in Beirut was attended by neo-Nazis and Islamic extremists united in their hatred of Jews. “Some extremists are now globalized,” he said.
White supremacists have been linked with anthrax in the past, but not in relation to an attack.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Friday that investigators believed a broad range of people were capable of the crime. “The quality anthrax sent to Senator Daschle’s office could be produced by a Ph.D. microbiologist and a sophisticated laboratory,” he told reporters.
US officials said the evidence so far does not point to either Russia or Iraq, something that leaves only the US as the possible source of the anthrax spread. However, FBI checks of private and government laboratories in the United States have not yet revealed any missing anthrax stockpiles, disgruntled scientists or other suspicious circumstances, one top official told the Post.
