The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) last week formally closed the case surrounding the 2001 mailings of anthrax-laced letters to Capitol Hill and journalists in New York and Florida. The bureau concluded that former Army researcher Bruce Ivins was the sole culprit behind the deadly attacks.
Ending its nearly nine-year investigation, the FBI, working together with the US Postal Service and Department of Justice, determined that Ivins mailed the letters, which killed five people and sickened 17 others, because of “intense personal and professional pressure.” He hatched the plan, the investigation concluded, to create a scare that would revitalize an anthrax vaccine project that he had been working on for 20 years. It seems he also carried a deep hatred for New York City, the site of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Ivins died of an apparent suicide in July 2008.
A 92-page report released on Friday was accompanied by thousands of pages of supporting documents, including e-mails, search warrants and other evidence. Noticeably missing, however, was any ‘smoking gun’ that inextricably linked Ivins to the mailings.
“This [investigation] has been a closed-minded, closed process from the beginning,” said Rush Holt, a Democrat Congressman from New Jersey, where the anthrax letters were mailed. “The evidence the FBI produced would not, I think, stand up in court.”
The validity of the FBI’s case will never be tested in court, but it is being scrutinized by a US National Academies panel that first met in July to examine the FBI’s scientific techniques. Last week’s announcement from the FBI “hasn’t changed anything about what the committee is doing, and they’re still going to submit their report” later this year, National Academies spokesperson William Skane told Nature Medicine.
A separate governmental report released last month called for an overhaul of the way dangerous pathogens are classified in US research.
Image of Bruce Ivins from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases via Wikipedia
