| ||
| ||
| ||
 |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
State Department: Powder likely not anthraxFBI to test suspicious material from letter to Powell
From Elise Labott
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- According to a preliminary assessment, the white powder in a letter opened Monday by a State Department employee is not anthrax, a department spokesman said. The powder is being taken to an FBI lab for conclusive testing. The letter was addressed to Secretary of State Colin Powell and was opened by an employee in the Office of Public Liaison, department spokesman Richard Boucher said. The State Department turned off the air vents and called the FBI, department spokesman Tom Casey said. He said FBI and diplomatic security officials are on the scene and that the "initial assessment" is that the concern over the powder was a false alarm. About 35 people are being held in the cordoned-off area as a precaution, Casey said. One source said 15 people were initially exposed. It will take two days before tests are able to determine what the powder is, a State Department official said. In the fall of 2001, anthrax-laced letters were sent to the offices of Democratic U.S. Sens. Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and to television network news offices in New York, and possibly other places as well. Five people -- two U.S. Postal Service employees in Washington; an employee at American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida; a 94-year-old woman in Oxford, Connecticut; and a New York hospital supply room worker -- died of exposure to anthrax. A pond in Frederick, Maryland, was drained in June so investigators could search the sediment as part of the probe. Investigators received a tip last year that some materials possibly used in the attacks might have been dumped into the pond. No suspects have been named in the investigation, and no arrests have been made. Former Army bioterrorism researcher Dr. Steven Hatfill -- who once worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland -- has been named a "person of interest" in the case by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. Sources told CNN last year that the strain of anthrax identified in the 2001 incidents was the same as that used in experiments at USAMRIID, the Army's biological warfare defense laboratory. Hatfill once lived in an apartment next to Fort Detrick, which is eight to 10 miles from the pond being drained. Frederick is about 50 miles northwest of Washington. Hatfill has denied having any role in or knowledge of the deadly anthrax mailings.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
