The FBI and CIA believe extremists in the US, not followers of Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, are probably behind this month's anthrax attacks, the Washington Post reported yesterday.
Senior officials also are increasingly concerned the germ-warfare attacks have diverted public attention from the larger threat posed by bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, the paper said. They believe the main suspect in the hijacked plane strikes on America on Sept. 11 is planning a second wave of attacks against US interests at home or abroad that could come at any time, the Post said.
Both the FBI and the US Postal Inspection Service are considering a wide range of domestic possibilities, including associates of right-wing hate groups and US residents sympathetic to the causes of Islamic extremists, in the letter-borne germ attacks.
"Everything seems to lean toward a domestic source," a senior government official told the newspaper. "Nothing seems to fit with an overseas terrorist-type operation."
Based on handwriting analysis and sophisticated profiling, investigators suspect one person wrote the three letters contaminated with anthrax but have drawn no conclusions about who is behind the attacks, officials said.
In a spate of cases involving letters laced with the anthrax spores, three people have died, at least 11 others have been infected and thousands more have been tested. In the latest scares, traces of the germ-warfare agent were detected at a mail inspection center serving the US Supreme Court, in the offices of three members of the House of Representatives and at a CIA facility.
The Post reported investigators have no clear suspects and are not even certain whether there are other undetected letters that contain the potentially deadly microbe.
The George W. Bush administration has said it does not rule out a link between the anthrax and bin Laden, although it has found no hard evidence.
On Friday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said investigators had determined that the pure, concentrated and highly dangerous anthrax delivered in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle "could be produced by a PhD microbiologist and a sophisticated laboratory."
"That does not rule out that it could be state-sponsored," Fleischer said at a briefing. "That does not rule out that it could come from a foreign location. But it certainly does expand it beyond state sponsorship or foreign locations."
There could be as many as 40 places in the US that have the ability to produce the lethal version of anthrax that was mailed to Daschle, said Senator Bob Graham, the Senate intelligence committee chairman.
The Post said the anti-Israel message in anthrax letters sent to Daschle and NBC News, and in bin Laden's statements are echoed by US extremists groups, such as Aryan Action, which praises the Sept. 11 plane attacks.
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