Postal route in N.J. tracked
8th case confirmed; anthrax studies suggest cases linked
By Frank D. Roylance and Marego Athans
Sun Staff
October 20, 2001
TRENTON, N.J. - Federal investigators descended on suburban Ewing Township yesterday, tracking a postal carrier's route where at least one of the anthrax-tainted letters that have rattled the nation in recent weeks might have been mailed.
FBI agents went door to door, asking residents and workers at businesses about suspicious activity. Investigators removed some mailboxes. Two local postal facilities were closed, and nearly 1,000 employees were advised to take antibiotics.
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In Washington, authorities said close examination of the anthrax bacteria mailed to offices in Florida, New York and Washington found that the samples were "indistinguishable," suggesting that the attacks were related.
"It does appear that it may have been from the same - the same batch," Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge told reporters at a White House briefing. "But it may have been distributed to different individuals to infect and to send into different communities."
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Farther north in New Jersey, Carroll said the FBI will run anthrax tests on items removed last month from the apartment of two Jersey City men detained by federal authorities after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The FBI was alerted after Wall Street Journal reporters visited the unlocked apartment of Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan and found a 1995 article on sarin nerve gas and a magazine article on the National Center for Infectious Diseases.
Azmath and Khan have been detained since they were picked up in Texas on an Amtrak train the day after the Sept. 11 attacks. They were alleged to be carrying about $5,000 and box-cutting knives similar to those used by the hijackers.
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The anthrax attack on the offices of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was launched three weeks after the New York attacks, in a letter very similar to the NBC letter, and postmarked at the same Trenton facility Oct. 9.
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Preliminary tests have turned up anthrax in at least two places overseas.
Sun staff writer Ellen Gamerman and wire reports contributed to this article.
Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun
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On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that a search at their residence in Jersey City found old issues of Time magazine and US News and World Report with cover stories on biological weapons and a gas attack in Tokyo.
Their room-mate Aslam Pervez, who once worked in Trenton and lived near the postal facility from where some of the letters suspected to have carried anthrax powder were posted, has also been detained.
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