- Confusion over the extent of US government involvement
in anthrax development and research deepened on Monday after a Democratic
congressman said documents in his possession showed that a laboratory under
the Department of Energy had illegally received a shipment of lethal, live
anthrax samples from a university in Arizona in late October.
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- The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) "requested,
received and used virulent anthrax it was not authorised to possess",
Edward Markey, a member of the House energy committee, said on Monday.
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- The energy department declined to comment. But the question
of how many research facilities - government and private - possess lethal
anthrax strains is likely to generate further controversy, particularly
in the wake of weekend admissions by the Central Intelligence Agency and
the US army that their laboratories were conducting research on virulent
anthrax spores.
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- Mr Markey said LANL had received the live anthrax from
Northern Arizona University on October 26 but failed to report the shipment
for nearly a month and was not authorised to work with virulent anthrax.
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- The admissions added to growing evidence that significantly
more government, academic and private laboratories possessed anthrax strains
for research purposes than initially thought. In November, at the height
of the anthrax scare which has so far caused five deaths, investigators
suggested that only a few government laboratories and a small number of
researchers were involved in working on anthrax.
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- The main concern, warned commentators, is what increasingly
appears to be the lack of clear, public records of facilities possessing
anthrax and the possibility of lax controls over the bacteria.
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- The White House on Monday acknowledged that evidence
in the recent spate of contaminated letter attacks was "increasingly
looking like" the anthrax they contained was produced in the US. A
CIA spokesman on Monday confirmed weekend reports that the agency possessed
some anthrax, but he said the agency's researchers used it "only to
learn about potential biological warfare threats".
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- For its part, the US Army Medical Research Institute
of Infectious Disease said at the weekend it had obtained a supply of the
lethal bacteria from the US agriculture department and had shared it with
five laboratories in the US, Canada and the UK.
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- The latest disclosures are embarrassing for the Bush
administration, not only because of current international criticism over
the recent US rejection of efforts to strengthen a 1972 biological weapons
convention. Confirmation of the involvement of various US military and
civilian agencies has also fuelled doubts about the accuracy of US official
reporting of its chemical and biological weapons research programmes.
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- Chuck Dasey, at the army's infectious diseases institute,
appeared to confirm reports that researchers had found a genetic match
between the anthrax spores in contaminated letters and the anthrax kept
at the institute. But in a comment that generated more questions than answers,
he said if true, that would not provide solid clues. "You can't say
it all came from [the institute]. We got it from another lab in the first
place and so presumably [the institute] is not the only lab that got it
from the Department of Agriculture."
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- On Monday, reports said the FBI had expressed surprise
over reports of the CIA's anthrax programme and was focusing its investigations
on a contractor that worked for the CIA. The FBI was also investigating
scientists at the various research laboratories.
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- http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View
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