Ricin May Have Been in U.S. Senate Office for Weeks, Officials Say

The ricin discovered in the office suite of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) might have been there for weeks, complicating efforts to track its origin, law enforcement officials said Friday (see GSN, Feb. 6).

No suspicious letter that might have contained the ricin has yet been found, officials said. One law enforcement official said it was “almost a fluke” that the material was even found at all. An intern working for Frist had noticed that there was more dust than usual on a letter-opening machine, the official said. Testing found that while most of the material was dust, a small amount was ricin.

The Dirksen Senate Office Building, which contains Frist’s offices, was set to reopen today, according to the Washington Post. Frist’s offices, though, will probably remain closed for a longer period, officials said (Morello/Lengel, Washington Post, Feb. 7).

As part of the investigation into the Senate ricin incident, along with two other ricin-containing letters found in the last few months, FBI officials are using DNA analysis to determine where the castor plants used to make the poison were located, the Post reported.

“The U.S. government has this well in hand,” said Lee Browning, a researcher with a Texas seed company who has consulted with the FBI about ricin production. “They will read this DNA, analyze the soil and the water content, and be able to say if it’s coming from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida or Texas. There’s a team of people hard at work on it,” Browning said.

As part of a growing concern over the possible terrorist use of ricin, Browning said, federal officials have collected samples of varieties of castor plants for use in forensic analysis (Marilyn Thompson, Washington Post, Feb. 8).

In another investigative tactic, federal law enforcement officials have expanded their effort to Frist’s home state of Tennessee, according to the Associated Press. A letter containing ricin and addressed to the White House that was intercepted in November bore a Chattanooga, Tenn., postmark, a federal law enforcement official said (Associated Press/ABCNews.com, Feb. 6).

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