CASE closed? Not if senior US politicians have anything to do with it. They are calling for an investigation into FBI evidence revealed last week that points the finger at Bruce Ivins, a senior anthrax researcher for the US army, for the spate of anthrax mail attacks in 2001.
Ivins’s death last month means this evidence will now not be examined in a court of law, but Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is calling for a “full and thorough vetting” of the claims.
Grassley notes that “more than 100 people” had access to the flask of anthrax spores that the FBI says genetically matched the spores used in the attacks. He wants to know how many samples of that batch were sent to labs other than Ivins’s, and how the FBI ruled out other people who might have had access to them.
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Details of oxygen isotopes in the anthrax used in the attack could help to identify where the bacteria were grown, Grassley says. He also wants to know why records of late-night work in Ivins’s lab did not focus the investigation on Ivins earlier, and whether there is video evidence that it was Ivins working those after-hours sessions.
“Why did records of late-night lab sessions not focus the investigation earlier?”
