THE FBI has a good idea who might be the “anthrax attacker” who sent contaminated letters though the US postal system last year, killing five and panicking a nation. But it has decided, for now, not to arrest him.
That’s the claim of leading bioweapons expert Barbara Rosenberg from the Federation of American Scientists, who has also been one of the strongest critics of the federal investigation into the attacks. “Either the FBI is under pressure from [government agencies] not to proceed because the subject knows too much,” she says in an analysis being circulated on the Internet this week, “or the FBI really is as incompetent as it seems.”
Rosenberg says the FBI could be dragging its feet because it fears the suspect could release other germ weapons if threatened with arrest. Or he could reveal embarrassing details of covert US biodefence research.
Advertisement
Soon after the anthrax attacks in October last year, says Rosenberg, at least five “inside experts” gave the FBI the same name—an anthrax expert who must have had enough forensic training to send letters with no fingerprints or other giveaways.
Rosenberg says she cannot divulge more without endangering her sources. But the suspect is believed to have had access to cultures at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland, which uses an anthrax strain identical to the attacker’s. This is crucial, because in a recent analysis, scientists at the University of Northern Arizona and the Institute for Genomic Research in Maryland showed that small genetic differences can accumulate between anthrax cultures that have been separated for a relatively short time (91av, 18 May, p 11).
Several laboratories around the world have cultures of “Ames” anthrax they originally got from USAMRIID. These have been collected for genetic comparison with the attacker’s bacteria. But the recent observation that bacteria from USAMRIID itself are virtually genetically identical to the attacker’s has fed suspicions that the attacker got his bugs straight from the source.
The FBI is giving lie-detector tests to around 200 USAMRIID scientists, and only a handful at other labs. According to leaks from those questioned, the FBI suspects the attacker grew his bacteria at USAMRIID.
Rosenberg suspects that the attacker may have known how to produce powders made of benign bacteria similar to anthrax, such as the one that Canadian researchers used last year to study how anthrax might behave in the post. None of the Canadians is under suspicion. It is not clear whether the FBI has compared any recently produced “safe” bacterial powders with the attacker’s anthrax.
The FBI has also been slow to follow other trails, such as anthrax hoax letters sent to the same people shortly after the real ones but before news of the attacks broke. Rosenberg says the hoax letters strongly resemble the first ones with anthrax. But the hoax ones are being studied by the FBI offices that deal with hoaxes, not the experts studying the contaminated letters.