Link Now Seen in Anthrax and Hijackings
By DAVID JOHNSTON with WILLIAM J. BROAD
ASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — Investigators pursuing the anthrax exposure cases in New York, Washington and Florida say they suspect that the rash of contaminated letters is related to the Sept. 11 attacks and are investigating the possibility that Al Qaeda confederates of the hijackers are behind the incidents.
Law enforcement and intelligence officials said they lacked concrete evidence or intelligence to explain who sent the anthrax-contaminated letters to news organizations in New York and to the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, in Washington, and whether they all contained the same type of anthrax.
The letter sent to Senator Daschle and another to NBC were postmarked from Trenton, and officials have said the letters were written by the same person. Several hijackers lived in New Jersey before taking over the United Airlines flight from Newark that slammed into a field in rural Pennsylvania.
Federal investigators said last night that they believed that the letter sent to Tom Brokaw was mailed from West Trenton, a neighborhood in the Trenton suburb of Ewing, and they have narrowed their search for the specific mailbox to a one-square- mile section of that neighborhood.
A letter carrier who officials said yesterday was infected with anthrax was assigned to deliver and collect mail on a route in West Trenton that covered 250 to 500 homes and businesses, and it is that route that investigators now believe was the source of the letter. That belief was deepened because the bar coding on the letter to Mr. Brokaw showed that the letter was taken to the main post office at a time that matched the carrier's shift.
Last night, investigators were testing for anthrax at several mail collection spots in the neighborhood.
Senior government officials said investigators were focusing on the ability of the hijackers or their accomplices to obtain highly refined anthrax from a foreign or domestic supplier. While they have not ruled out the possibility that another criminal could be behind the anthrax attacks, investigators are looking intensely at evidentiary threads linking the letters to the hijackers.
Investigators are focusing on Mohamed Atta, a hijacking ringleader, who was interested in crop-dusting aircraft and once lived near the offices in Boca Raton, Fla., of American Media Inc., where the first victims worked. Crop-dusting airplanes could be used to spread anthrax or other toxins.
Today, F.B.I. agents also searched the Jersey City home of three men who have been in custody since last month because of a possible connection to the hijackings, after learning that they kept an assortment of magazines and news articles about biological warfare in their apartment. Investigators may have overlooked them in an earlier search.
Two of the men who lived there, Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Azmath, boarded a flight from Newark Airport to San Antonio the morning of Sept. 11, but the plane was forced to land in St. Louis after hijackings of four other flights forced all air traffic in the country to a halt. They were arrested the next day on an Amtrak train in Texas, carrying $5,000 in cash and box-cutting knives similar to those used by the terrorists who hijacked the four flights.
Federal scientists examining the anthrax used in the Florida and New York attacks have tentatively concluded that the type is a domestic strain similar to a highly virulent type known as the Ames strain, which was discovered in Iowa in 1980. Reputedly, it is even more dangerous than the anthrax the American military used for anthrax weapons before President Richard M. Nixon renounced them in 1969. The Ames strain is now used in labs around the world.
In Boca Raton, investigators have not determined how anthrax was delivered to the building occupied by American Media, a tabloid newspaper publisher. But some hijackers lived nearby in the months before the attacks, among them Mr. Atta.
An additional line of inquiry undercuts a competing theory, that a disgruntled employee of a domestic laboratory that uses anthrax carried out the attacks. F.B.I. agents checked every American laboratory that uses anthrax and found that none were missing inventory. In addition, none reported suspicious activity.
The investigation has linked F.B.I. agents and scientists in a race to find who sent the letters. Federal scientists examining the anthrax used in the Florida and New York attacks have tentatively concluded that it is a domestic strain that bears no resemblance to the strains Russia and Iraq turned into biological weapons.
The scientists said the emerging evidence decreased the likelihood that those countries were connected to the anthrax letters. But they emphasized that the clues in no way ruled out foreign sponsorship because the identified strain was available overseas.
They said it was conceivable that a foreign government or terrorist organization deliberately chose a domestic strain to throw off federal investigators. The clues are merely suggestive, they said.
"There's no indication that it came from the Russian or Iraqi programs, but you can't rule that out," said a federal scientist familiar with the investigation.
Complicating things, all Ames strains, the type of anthrax scientists believe was used in the NBC letter, are not identical because random mutations in the genetic codes of anthrax bacteria can cause individual cultures to become increasingly different in character from their original seed stock.
Even so, federal and private experts said that, to the best of their knowledge, Baghdad was unable to obtain the Ames strain.
"The Iraqis tried to get it but didn't succeed," Richard Spertzel, a microbiologist and former head of biological inspection teams in Iraq for the United Nations, said in an interview. "It's a nasty bug."
A federal scientist familiar with the investigation agreed but said the emerging evidence, including detailed genetic analyses of the strains to tease out even deeper clues, was helping narrow the possibilities of who launched the anthrax attacks.
One senior government official said that some investigators were skeptical of a connection between Al Qaeda and the anthrax. The official said the evidence amassed so far, like records of credit card transactions, e-mail messages or cellphone calls, did not tie the hijackers to any activity clearly related to anthrax.
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