SANTIAGO: Neo-Nazi groups in the US may be behind the anthrax-by-mail attacks occurred in recent weeks in that country, said Chilean journalist Razl Sohr, expert in defence issues and international policy. Sohr presented a revised edition of his book ”Las guerras que nos esperan” (The Wars that Await Us) here on Thursday. The book released 14 months ago covered the case of Larry Harris, of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nation organization, who was arrested in May 1995 in Ohio, said Sohr, a commentator on international politics for Chile’s National Television station.

Harris was an employee at a leading biological laboratory. When he was arrested, investigators found in his possession bacteria that cause bubonic plague, allegedly being stored so that right-wing activists could carry out biological attacks against other US citizens.

Given that precedent, the journalist said that the mailings of anthrax-carrying letters in the US “are more likely to be the work of some extreme right-wing North Americans than related to the Sept 11 attacks,” he said. The US intelligence services “were looking in the wrong direction, concentrating on the nation’s missile defence system instead,” commented Sohr. The fact that there are still no clear evidence on the origin of the anthrax spores “is another failure of intelligence” and further proof of the mistaken hypotheses the CIA has been working with since Sept 11, he added.

“There are several extreme right-wing militias in the US that are working with biological weapons,” Sohr said. “From what we know so far, the anthrax strains apparently come from within the US, from military laboratories. Some elements of these right-wing groups have ties to those military laboratories,” he pointed out. “The other element that supports my hypothesis is that the victims of these anthrax incidents are precisely those one would not consider to be the enemies of the radicals who committed the Sept 11 attacks, because they are people who would tend to have more progressive attitudes,” said the journalist.

“The way they are carrying out these attacks in different parts of the United States does not give the impression that it could be something directly linked to Al Qaeda or some similar organization. As such, I think there are reasons to believe that these biological attacks using anthrax are coming from the extreme right.” The US spends $30 billion on its intelligence services each year, which makes it “all the more extraordinary that they have no idea where the anthrax used in the biological attacks came from,” stated Sohr.—Dawn/InterPress Service.