Fears of a potential bio-terror attack in continental Europe were heightened last night after the discovery of two flasks containing a lethal ricin compound in a railway station in Paris.
The French interior ministry said last night that traces of ricin, a weapon suspected to be in the arsenal of the al-Qaeda network, had been found in the left luggage department of the Gare de Lyon railway station in Paris.
A major hunt is now underway by French anti-terrorism police for the suspects who left the flasks at one of the French capital’s busiest stations.
The announcement of the find in Paris came as authorities are stepping up security against terrorist threats in France following the attacks against Iraq.
France doubled the number of soldiers on the streets to 800 and ordered increased surveillance in train stations, ports and sensitive sites.
A ministry spokesman said the highly toxic poison, which sparked a major terrorism scare when traces of it were found in a flat in north London earlier this year, had been identified by government scientists following a call to the police from the French state railway company, SNCF, on March 17.
”Following the call, police recovered two flasks containing a powder, one bottle containing a liquid and two other flasks also containing a liquid,” the spokesperson said.
”Subsequent analysis has shown that the two latter flasks contained traces of ricin in a chemical compound that proved to be a highly toxic poison,” he said.
”Further tests are continuing in an attempt to find out more about the origins of the product and, of course, who left it there.”
British anti-terrorism police arrested several people in January following the discovery of ricin in a flat above a chemist’s shop in Finsbury Park, north London.
At the time of the London discovery, Scotland Yard said only traces of ricin were found and expressed disquiet that it may have been part of a wider shipment that has yet to be traced. Last night the Yard said it was aware of the Paris seizure but there were no formal links between the two inquiries.
However, several of the men arrested in London and Manchester in connection with the Finsbury Park discovery were of north African origin and had strong connections to France.
One man, Algerian Nasreddine Fekhadji, has been charged with conspiring to develop or produce chemical weapons. After the raid in north London in which traces of ricin were found, Fekhadji was charged with having a false French passport and false French identity card. He is accused of conspiring with four others to produce a chemical weapon between the start of last year and January 6 this year.
The poison is one of the deadliest to occur naturally and is derived from castor plant beans, grown worldwide for castor oil.
Many times more deadly than cyanide, ricin is considered as a viable biological warfare agent. Iraq is suspected of having worked to produce the poison at some of its research laboratories, and according to media reports it was found at an al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul in late 2001.
Scientists say less than one milligram of the poison is enough to kill a person weighing 70kg (11st). The most famous known assassination using ricin was that of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978, who died after being injected with a poison-tipped umbrella. – Guardian Unlimited Â