A Qaida Connection Gains Currency in FBI Anthrax Probe

by David Johnston and William J. Broad
The International Herald Tribune
October 20, 2001

 

WASHINGTON - Investigators pursuing the anthrax exposure cases in New York, Washington and Florida say they suspect that the rash of contaminated letters is related to the Sept. 11 suicide attacks and are investigating a possibility that Qaida confederates of the hijackers are behind the incidents. Senior government officials said that they had not settled on any single theory but added that investigators were focusing on the ability of the hijackers or their accomplices to obtain highly refined anthrax from a foreign or domestic supplier.

Although they have not ruled out a possibility that another criminal could be behind the anthrax attacks, investigators are intensely looking at evidentiary threads linking the letters to the hijackers.

Investigators are focusing on Mohamed Atta, a hijacking ringleader, who was interested in crop-dusting aircraft and once lived near the offices of American Media in Boca Raton, Florida, where the first victims worked. Crop-dusting airplanes could be used to spread anthrax or other toxins. On Thursday, FBI agents also searched the Jersey City, New Jersey, home of three men who have been in custody since last month because of a possible connection to the hijackings.

The agents conducted the search after learning that the men kept an assortment of magazines and news articles about biological warfare in their apartment. Investigators may have overlooked them in an earlier search.

Two of the men who lived there, Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, boarded a flight from Newark, New Jersey, to San Antonio, Texas, the morning of Sept. 11, but the plane was forced to land in St. Louis, Missouri, after the hijackings of four other flights led to the grounding of all commercial traffic in the country.

The two were arrested the next day on an Amtrak train in Texas, carrying $5,000 in cash and box-cutting knives similar to those used by the terrorists who hijacked the four airliners.

Law enforcement and intelligence officials said they lacked concrete evidence or intelligence to explain who had sent the anthrax-tainted letters to news organizations in New York and to the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, in Washington, and whether they all contained the same type of anthrax.

But one senior government official has said that some investigators are skeptical of a Qaida connection to the anthrax. The official said that the evidence amassed so far, like records of credit card transactions, e-mail messages or cell phone calls, did not tie the hijackers to any activity clearly related to anthrax.

Federal scientists examining the anthrax used in the Florida and New York attacks have tentatively concluded that the type is a domestic strain similar to a highly virulent type known as the Ames strain, which was discovered in Iowa in 1980.

The Ames strain is now used in labs around the world. The letter sent to Senator Daschle, and another sent to the NBC television network, were postmarked Trenton, New Jersey, and officials have said that the letters were written by the same person. Several hijackers lived in New Jersey before taking over the United Airlines flight from Newark Airport that crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania.

Federal investigators said Thursday night that they believed the letter sent to the NBC-News anchorman Tom Brokaw had been mailed from West Trenton, a neighborhood in the Trenton suburb of Ewing, and added that they had narrowed their search for the specific mailbox to a one-square-mile (2.6-square-kilometer) section of that neighborhood.

A letter carrier who officials said Thursday was infected with anthrax had been assigned to deliver and collect mail on a route in West Trenton that covered 250 to 500 homes and businesses. It is that route that investigators now believe was the source of the letter.

That belief was deepened because the bar coding on the letter to Mr. Brokaw showed that the letter was taken to the main post office at a time that matched the carrier's shift.

On Thursday night, investigators were testing for anthrax at several mail collection spots in the neighborhood.

In Boca Raton, investigators have not determined how anthrax was delivered to the building occupied by American Media, a tabloid-newspaper publisher. Some hijackers lived nearby in the months before the attacks, among them Mr. Atta.

An additional line of inquiry undercuts a competing theory, that a disgruntled employee of a domestic laboratory that uses anthrax carried out the attacks. FBI agents checked every American laboratory that uses anthrax and found that none of them were missing inventory. In addition, none reported suspicious activity.

The investigation has linked FBI agents and scientists in a race to find who sent the letters. Federal scientists examining the anthrax used in the Florida and New York attacks have tentatively concluded that it is a domestic strain that bears no resemblance to strains that Russia and Iraq have turned into biological weapons.

The scientists said the emerging evidence decreased the likelihood that those foreign governments were connected to the anthrax letters. But they emphasized that the clues in no way ruled out foreign sponsorship since the identified strain is available overseas.

They said it was conceivable that a foreign government or terrorist organization might have deliberately chosen a domestic strain to throw off federal investigators. The clues are merely suggestive, they said.

"There's no indication that it came from the Russian or Iraqi programs, but you can't rule that out," said a federal scientist familiar with the investigation.



© Copyright 2001

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