October 29, 2001	Monday	Shaba'an 11, 1422

WASHINGTON, Oct 28: Stumped by a string of germ attacks that have killed three Americans so far, investigators are wondering if homegrown extremists, not international terrorists, are behind the deaths by mail.

The puzzling bio-terror scare has left nearly a dozen other Americans infected with anthrax, forced the shutdown of government offices and left the postal system in disarray, with no delivery in some Washington neighbourhoods.

Investigators, certain that the anthrax used to taint letters to lawmakers and media organizations was produced in laboratories, are trying to determine who manufactured it, saying it could even have been made in the United States.

The Washington Post on Saturday quoted unnamed intelligence officials saying they suspected domestic extremists were responsible for the bio-terror attacks, but cited no hard evidence.

FBI and other investigators are looking at US-based right-wing hate groups, as well as US residents sympathetic to Islamic movements, the daily said.

“Nothing seems to fit with an overseas terrorist type operation,” an intelligence official told the Post.

A spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) declined to comment on the report.

Meanwhile, the post office in Princeton, New Jersey, has been closed following a preliminary positive test for anthrax, NJ health officials announced. Another office in southwest Washington was closed on Friday.

More than 12,000 postal workers in the metropolitan Washington and New York areas have been tested and/or are receiving treatment as a precaution, the USPS said on its website.

Postal inspectors have arrested 14 individuals for anthrax-related hoaxes and were investigating 13 additional cases. A total of some 5,500 incidents have been reported, it said.

Authorities dismissed a report that the anthrax used bore the trademarks of Iraqi manufacture, and a law enforcement official, who asked not to be named, said “state sponsorship is being considered more and more unlikely.”

Bio-terrorism expert Barbara Hatch Rosenberg said only US scientists had the ability “to reduce anthrax to the sort of highly consistent, smaller particles” found in a letter mailed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

Daschle lashed out on Saturday at those behind the attacks, urging Americans not to be “paralyzed by our anger or slowed by our sadness”.

He outlined three points for a national effort to counter bio- terror threats: the increase of the nation’s supply of antibiotics and vaccines; better coordination of the government’s response; and accelerated scientific research.

REVIEW OF DEATH: The New York Medical Examiner’s office has opened an investigation into whether anthrax caused the death earlier this month of a local postal worker, according to news reports early Sunday.

The medical examiner’s office would review the circumstances surrounding the death of postal worker Laura Jones as a “precautionary measure,” CNN reported.

Jones died on October 10 of what was determined at the time to be natural causes.

So far, 14 people have contracted either inhalation anthrax or skin anthrax, including to two Washington, DC area postal workers who died of the disease.

Officials here have said anthrax cultures have been discovered in four mail-sorting machines inside Manhattan’s largest mail-distribution centre.—AFP