- The FBI is concentrating its hunt for the source of the
anthrax used to terrorise America on laboratories used by the CIA and British
government scientists.
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- Only five laboratories - including the Defence Science
and Technology Labs at Porton Down, Salisbury - have been found to have
spores of anthrax identical to the bacteria sent through the post to two
Democratic senators and news organisations in New York and Florida.
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- But frustrated FBI agents say they have not been able
to get enough information about security at Porton Down - one of the most
secretive establishments in Britain - to decide whether it could be the
source of the terrorists' anthrax.
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- Another focus of the FBI inquiry is the CIA, which has
been conducting its own experiments on anthrax in the interests of defence
from biological weapons.
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- Both Porton Down, directly, and the CIA, indirectly,
received their samples of the particular anthrax spores used in the attacks
from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infections Diseases at Fort
Detrick, about 50 miles north of Washington.
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- Sources within the FBI said the CIA was under investigation
because of the bureau's "interest" in a contractor who used to
work for the agency in its anthrax project.
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- The FBI believes the attacks, which have killed five
people, to be the work of a domestic terrorist, although they have not
ruled out links with Osama bin Laden and his al-Qa'ida network.
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- Meanwhile, investigators revealed yesterday that they
believe David Hose, a postal worker who survived one of the worst cases
of airborne anthrax, caught the disease at his workplace, a State Department
mail sorting office in Sterling, Virginia. Mr Hose apparently walked by
sorting machines where, on October 12, an infected envelope passed between
whirring rollers, forcing deadly spores into the air.
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- Last week that letter was finally opened, amid elaborate
precautions, by scientists in America's top germ warfare defence laboratory
- and the anthrax inside was confirmed as so easily airborne that it was
"jumping off" lab slides.
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