Washington, Cape Town | Thursday
A BIOTERRORIST attack struck fear at the heart of America’s political system on Wednesday, sending shudders across the globe as US warplanes bombarded Afghanistan amid signs of a looming ground offensive.
US jets pounded the Taliban regime’s frontline for the first time in apparent preparation for ground attacks, but aid agencies called for a pause in bombing, and a direct hit on a boys’ school in Kabul further fuelled opposition to the airstrikes.
But as US bombers and gunships sought to flush out terrorists, the US House of Representatives was closed for five days after 33 people were found to have been exposed to deadly anthrax bacterium sent in a letter to a leading senator.
Most of those exposed to the bacterium worked in the offices of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, where an anthrax-laced letter was found on Monday. The others were congressional police officers and two people working in Democratic Senator Russell Feingold’s office.
A wave of anthrax alerts and hoaxes has caused anxiety across the globe.
In the United States, a total of 46 cases of anthrax exposure, one of them fatal, have been reported in Florida, New York and Washington amid fears of terror reprisals for the US-led assaults on Afghanistan aimed at flushing out the perpetrators of last month’s kamikaze attacks on New York and Washington.
Meanwhile, a school near Cape Town was evacuated on Wednesday after the headmaster received a suspicious envelope with white powder in the third anthrax scare around the city in less than 24 hours, police said.
Police superintendent Nico Franken said the principal of Fish Hoek Middle School, just south of Cape Town, opened an envelope addressed to him in his office on Wednesday afternoon and a note saying ”anthrax bacillus”, and the powdery substance fell out.
Franken said police had cordoned off the area and sent the pupils home.
The principal, two teachers and two secretaries were taken to a hospital.
On Tuesday evening, a security analyst living in Cape Town, Clarence Tshitereke, found a parcel with white powder and a death threat in his mailbox while officers at the Athlone police station discovered a suspicious parcel with powder in their dustbin.
National police representative Joseph Ngobeni said security forces were placed on full alert and the letter Tshitereke found was sent to forensic laboratories in Pretoria for testing to see if it contained anthrax spores.
”At this stage we cannot confirm that it really is anthrax. We regard it as just a scare and would urge the public not to panic as the security forces are on alert,” Commissioner Ngobeni said.
In Pretoria, police arrested a man who put coffee creamer in an envelope in a colleague’s mailbox as a ”practical joke”.
Ngobeni said police were called to the offices of the registrar of deeds in central Pretoria after an envelope containing a powdery substance was found in a mailbox.
”Investigations revealed that someone played a practical joke on a colleague by placing an envelope containing Cremora in his mailbox,” Ngobeni said.
”The person responsible for this joke/hoax was a male 41 years of age and was arrested by the police on a charge of intimidation.”
In Cape Town, local police representative Jacques Wiese said that 24 policemen who had handled the parcels found at Tshitereke’s home and at Athlone had been admitted to a military hospital in the city for tests and observation.
Tshitereke, who lives in Cape Town’s Claremont suburb, found the note in his postbox along with junk mail upon returning home on Wednesday after several days away.
The death threat read: ”What do you wish? Anthrax death” and a skull and crossbones were drawn underneath the message.
Claremont police seized the post box containing the white substance and sealed the suspicious items in a drum, before sending them to forensic laboratories.
Disaster management personnel and firefighters on Wednesday morning rushed to the police station, which has been evacuated and cordoned off.
Wiese said the Athlone police station in Cape Town was also evacuated for a few hours on Wednesday morning after police found a suspicious parcel ”with some white stuff” in a dustbin outside the station.
He said the powder irritated the sinus passages of several policemen and they immediately called for help.
Two people in New York have already been confirmed as suffering from anthrax and two were infected in Florida — all of them working for or linked to media companies — including one man who died at the start of the crisis on October 5.
No anthrax attacks have been confirmed outside the United States but hoaxes and false alarms kept people on edge worldwide as scientists raced to check each case of suspect material sent by post or spotted at sensitive locations.
US jets meanwhile struck the Afghan capital Kabul and the main cities of Jalalabad and Kandahar in a series of fierce and sustained day and night raids.
In Kandahar, where the onslaught was described as particularly ferocious, Taliban officials claimed 20 civilians had been killed, including an entire family who were wiped out as they tried to flee the southern city in a truck.
The ruling militia also claimed two clinics in the city, the militia’s main base, had been hit, a day after the United States admitted mistakenly bombing a Red Cross warehouse in Kabul.
A UN representative in Islamabad said a US bomb scored a ”direct hit” on a boys school in Kabul on Wednesday, but failed to explode, a strike that will likely further opposition to the strikes in the Muslim world.
A group of six international aid agencies called for a pause in airstrikes to allow food supplies to be delivered before the severe Afghan winter begins.
”It is evident now that we cannot, in reasonable safety, get food to hungry people,” Oxfam director Barbara Stocking said.
The United Nations estimates 50 000 tonnes of food must get into Afghanistan in the next month to stop tens of thousands of people starving this winter. Only 10 000 tonnes have made it in the last month.
But despite the tensions, President George W Bush warned his campaign against global terror would last a long time. ”You mark my words, people are going to get tired of the war on terrorism – and by the way, it may take more than two years.” – Sapa-AFP