Who sent the anthrax?.

An advocate for the control of biological weapons who has been tracking the investigation into the autumn anthrax attacks told a panel at Princeton University that the FBI has a prime suspect in the case. But the advocate, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Chemical & Biological Weapons Program, speculated the FBI is "dragging its feet" in pressing charges because the suspect is an ex-military scientist familiar with "secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed." Rosenberg said the FBI has known of the suspect since Oct. and has already interrogated him. "There are a number of insiders--government insiders--who know people in the anthrax field who have a common suspect," Rosenberg said. "The FBI has questioned that person more than once...so it looks as though the FBI is taking that person very seriously." (NJ.com, Feb. 19) The anthrax letters--sent to US Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, the New York Post, TV anchorman Tom Brokaw, and others--killed five people, infected 13 more and forced senators to evacuate their offices for over two months. Rosenberg said her evidence pointed to a man who probably worked at the US military lab at Fort Detrick, MD. He would have been vaccinated, and had access to classified information about modifying and isolating the spores. "We can draw a likely portrait of the perpetrator as a former Fort Detrick scientist who is now working for a contractor in the Washington DC area," she said. (UK Guardian, Feb. 20) Other experts agreed that the perpetrator was likely a technician with government background. Arthur O. Anderson, chief of clinical pathology at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), was amazed when he saw the anthrax sent to Sen. Daschle. "There was nothing there except spores," he told Salon. "Normally, if you take a crude preparation of anthrax spores, you see parts of degenerated bacteria. But this stuff was highly refined." David Franz, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq and bio-defense scientist at USAMRIID, who now works for the Southern Research Institute, a defense contractor, concurred: "Only a very small group of people could have made this. If you look at the sample from the standpoint of biology, it tells me this person was very good at what they do. And this wasn't the first batch they've made. They've done this for years. The concentration was a trillion spores per gram. That's incredibly concentrated." Incredibly, Salon noted, the FBI has not yet subpoenaed employee records of the labs where Ames-strain anthrax is worked with. (Salon, Feb. 8)