WASHINGTON - Computers recently seized from a Frederick, Md., library may hold clues about the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people, the FBI said in an affidavit Thursday.
Bruce E. Ivins, the army scientist who investigators say carried out the attacks, used the computers for about 90 minutes on July 24 to read email and review a website dedicated to the anthrax investigation, Special Agent Marlo Arredondo wrote in the seven-page document.
Agents removed the computers last Thursday from the C. Burr Artz Library in downtown Frederick and will search them for any sign of relevant communications including writings identifying a plan to kill witnesses, or perhaps suicide letters, the document states.
Ivins went to the library on the same day he was released from a two-week psychiatric hospital stay that followed his counsellor's petition for a protective order. The affidavit asserted that Ivins had said during a group therapy session with the counsellor July 9 that he was a suspect in the anthrax investigation and planned to get a Glock firearm from his son to kill co-workers and others he felt had wronged him.
The affidavit also states that Ivins said during the group session that he had been walking around Frederick late at night hoping someone would try to hurt him so that he could stab them with a sharp writing pen.
Separately Thursday, Senator Patrick Leahy said he wants to know Ivins' motivation for mailing him a letter that contained deadly anthrax spores. Leahy (D-Vt.) told a news conference in Williston, Vt., that he got off lucky.
Advanced DNA testing led federal investigators to suspect Ivins in the killings. The scientist's odd behaviour, suspicious emails and unusual work hours convinced them they had the right man.
The government declared the 2001 attacks solved Wednesday, pointing the blame at Ivins, who committed suicide last week as prosecutors prepared to bring charges. The Justice Department said it was confident it could have convicted the scientist, who spent his career developing anthrax vaccines and cures at the bioweapons lab at Fort Detrick, Md.
Authorities cited advanced DNA testing that showed Ivins, 62, had in his laboratory anthrax spores identical to those that killed five and shocked a country still reeling from the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Prosecutors described Ivins' unexplained late nights in the laboratory just before the attacks. They released an email excerpt that used language similar to that of one of the anthrax letters. They said he was angry about criticism of his anthrax vaccine and might have released the toxin to drum up support for his drug.
Other emails revealed his troubled mind in the period leading up to the anthrax mailings.
"I wish I could control the thoughts in my mind," Ivins writes in an email to a friend dated Aug. 12, 2000. He goes on, "I get incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times, and there's nothing I can do until they go away, either by themselves or with drugs."
It was enough for the Justice Department to declare solved a case that for years had been one of its most puzzling cases.
"We regret that we will not have the opportunity to present evidence to the jury," U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor said.
One victim agreed, but said he is satisfied by the evidence the government laid out for survivors and families.
"This is justice enough for me," New York Post editor Mark Cunningham, one of three of the paper's staffers who suffered anthrax skin infections, wrote in Thursday's editions.
But it was not enough to convince Ivins' supporters and may not be enough to quiet critics who say the FBI was looking for someone to blame after focusing on the wrong man for too long.
"I just don't think he did it and I don't think the evidence exists," said Ivins' lawyer, Paul F. Kemp, adding that prosecutors' best evidence made only "a good case for continuing the investigation. But I think they're done with it. I think they're burnt and they've got nowhere to go with it."
Investigators at the FBI and U.S. Postal Service originally thought al-Qaida may have been behind the attacks. The case "quickly became a global investigation, spanning six continents," said Joseph Persichini, assistant director of the FBI's Washington field office. It wasn't long, though, before the government began focusing on one man, Fort Detrick scientist Steven Hatfill. It would be years before DNA technology narrowed the field to Ivins and a handful of others who had access to a specific batch of anthrax.
Hatfill got $5.8 million to settle a lawsuit he filed against the Justice Department to clear his name, and authorities kept investigating.
Ivins had in his laboratory highly purified anthrax spores with "certain genetic mutations identical" to the poison used in the attacks, according to an affidavit among a stack of documents the government released, all seemingly pointing to his guilt. Investigators also said they had traced back to his lab the type of envelopes used to send the deadly powder through the mails.
He allegedly submitted false anthrax samples to the FBI to throw investigators off his trail and was unable to provide "an adequate explanation for his late laboratory work hours" around the time of the attacks, according to documents that officials made public to support their case.
Investigators also said he sought to frame unidentified co-workers and had immunized himself against anthrax and yellow fever in early September 2001, several weeks before the first anthrax-laced envelope was received in the mail.
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