NEW YORK (Reuters) - A suspicious powder was found in an envelope at a Connecticut mail sorting facility on the same night the deadly poison ricin was discovered in a U.S. Senate mail room in Washington, officials said on Tuesday.
A mail clerk discovered sandy granules in an envelope about midnight Monday at Wallingford, Connecticut, in one of the same facilities in which anthrax spores were found in 2001, a U.S. postal official said. The 2001 find came during a major anthrax scare that also involved Senate offices in the U.S. Capitol.
The clerk was decontaminated as a precaution and was not injured. Preliminary tests of the powder were inconclusive.
A 94-year-old Connecticut woman was one of five people who died after inhaling the anthrax bacteria that was spread in mail in the months immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. The perpetrators of the anthrax deaths are still not known.
Wallingford is the major mail sorting center for the New England region. A U.S. postal official said the employee who found the suspicious powder was wearing gloves.
"It was field-tested and X-rayed and the results came back inconclusive in terms of a biotoxin," said Kevin McDonough, assistant postal inspector in charge of the New England region.
The envelope and other mail that could have been contaminated was isolated, McDonough said.
He said results from testing by the Connecticut state health laboratory would be known later on Tuesday.
In Washington, U.S. Capitol Police said a suspicious white powder found in a Senate office building tested positive for ricin in several preliminary tests. The discovery disrupted Congress and echoed the 2001 anthrax scare.