Posted on 08/07/2002 12:49:42 PM PDT by knighthawk
LYON, France (AP) — When about 30 padded letters destined for the United States were stuffed into a mail box at a small post office in southeastern France last week, it raised suspicions.
Fearing the envelopes might contain biological agents such as anthrax, police carefully opened them and found pills sometimes taken by athletes who want to bulk up or improve their performance.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday that Interpol had opened an inquiry into the envelopes.
Police did not release the names or locations of those to whom the letters were addressed.
The suspiciously large number of envelopes were pushed into a mail box on Aug. 1 at a post office in Vaulx-en-Velin, outside Lyon.
``After more in-depth verifications, we noticed the names of the senders did not correspond to anything,'' Marc Plebani, of the Vaulx-en-Velin post office, told LCI television.
``It was the same person who was sending them all, under assumed names,'' he said.
Anthrax-laced letters mailed in the United States since late September have killed five people and sickened more than a dozen.
Vaulx-en-Velin was a base of operations of an Islamic network that was behind a wave of deadly bombings in 1995 in Paris and Lyon.
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