Global Security Newswire

Even with the closing of the U.S. Justice Department's investigation of the 2001 anthrax mailing, some scientists who worked with former Army microbiologist and sole suspect Bruce Ivins contend that the federal case was weak and would never have stood up in court, the Frederick News-Post reported yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 22).

"The evidence is still very circumstantial and unconvincing as a whole," said Ivins' former boss at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Jeffrey Adamovicz.

On Friday, the Justice Department released a nearly 100-page of the investigation into the anthrax attacks and hundreds of pages of supporting documents. Authorities say the evidence proves that Ivins, based out of Fort Detrick in Maryland, acted alone in carrying out the attacks which killed five people and resulted in a massive public scare. He committed suicide in 2008 before any charges were filed.

At the request of lawmakers, the National Academy of Science has undertaken an examination of the scientific methodology used by the FBI in tracing the lethal spores found in the letters to anthrax samples possessed by Ivins.

"I'm curious as to why they closed the case while the [academy] review is still ongoing," Adamovicz stated by e-mail. "Is it because the review is going unfavorable for the FBI?" (Megan Eckstein, Frederick News-Post, Feb. 23).

The FBI concluded in its summary that "RMR-1029, a spore-batch created and maintained at USAMRIID by Dr. Ivins, was the parent material for the anthrax used in the mailings. Further, in the days leading up to each of the mailings, Dr. Ivins, without any apparent legitimate purpose or explanation, was alone late at night in the lab where RMR-1029 was stored, together with the highly sophisticated lab equipment needed to grow, harvest, and store the anthrax used in the mailings."

The summary adds: "In addition, Dr. Ivins was among the very few anthrax researchers nationwide with the knowledge and ability to create the highly purified spores used in the mailings. Finally, everyone else who had access to RMR-1029 was ruled out as the mailer because, among other reasons, they lacked the ability and/or opportunity to prepare and store the material" (U.S. Justice Department, release, Feb. 19).

The fact that Ivins kept very late laboratory hours in the days before the letters were mailed is not as unusual as the FBI contends, said former USAMRIID head of bacteriology Gerry Andrews. Ivins was working on multiple projects at the time could have kept him at the laboratory late, he argued.

"The FBI, I think, is trying to give folks the wrong impression of the time line," according to Andrews.

Critics contend that the FBI was wrong to assume that the anthrax spores could only have been produced shortly before they were mailed. They actually could date back to 1997, Adamovicz said.

"There is an assumption by the FBI that the spores could have only been prepared in the week before each mailing. This is a fatal error in logic," he stated. "The only reason that I can derive why the FBI has proposed this is that it is the only period that helps provide circumstantial evidence against Bruce."

A scientist would need between 25 to 50 weeks to produce the anthrax spores used in the mailings if he were working with the samples to which Ivins had access, Andrews said.

"Bruce didn't have the skill to make spore preps of that concentration," he said. "He never could make a spore prep like the ones found in the letters."

Andrews also disputed the FBI assertion that Ivins wanted to create a massive public scare in order to secure more public funding for his anthrax vaccine research which was in danger of coming to an end. Rather, Ivins' work was funded until the end of 2005, he said (Eckstein, Frederick News-Post).