US: Ivins solely responsible for anthrax attacks

Videos
Photos

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-08-07 11:19

WASHINGTON -- The murder weapon was a flask.

Army scientist Bruce Ivins was the anthrax killer whose mailings took five lives and rattled the nation in 2001, prosecutors asserted Wednesday, alleging he had in his lab a container of the lethal, highly purified spores involved and access to the distinctive envelopes used to mail them.

This US Army handout photo shows Dr. Bruce Ivins at a 2003 awards ceremony. US authorities are "confident" that Ivins, a government scientist who killed himself last month, was the only person responsible for deadly anthrax attacks in the United States in 2001, officials said Wednesday. [Agencies]

Making its points against Ivins, a brilliant yet deeply troubled man who committed suicide last week, the government released a stack of documents to support a damning though circumstantial case in the worst bioterror episode in US history. The court documents were a combination of hard DNA evidence, suspicious behavior and, sometimes, outright speculation.

Ivins' attorney said the government was "taking a weird guy and convicting him of mass murder" without real evidence. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa called for a congressional investigation.

Ivins had 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 the government documents.

Investigators also said he sought to frame unnamed 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.

Ivins killed himself last week as investigators closed in, and US Attorney Jeffrey Taylor said at a Justice Department news conference, "We regret that we will not have the opportunity to present evidence to the jury."

The scientist's attorney, Paul F. Kemp, heatedly dismissed that comment.

"They didn't talk about one thing that they got as result of all those searches," he said. "I just don't think he did it, and I don't think the evidence exists."

Taylor conceded the evidence was largely if not wholly circumstantial but insisted it would have been enough to convict.

The prosecutor's news conference capped a fast-paced series of events in which the US government partially lifted its veil of secrecy in the investigation of the poisonings that followed closely after the airliner terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Previous page 1 2 3 4 Next Page