A top US biodefence researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the September 11 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report.
The scientist, Bruce Ivins (62) who worked for the past 18 years at the government’s biodefence labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had been told about the impending prosecution, the Los Angeles Times reported
for Friday editions. The laboratory has been at the centre of the FBI’s investigation of the anthrax attacks, which killed five people.
Ivins died on Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. The Times, quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken
a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.
Tom Ivins, a brother of the scientist, told the Associated Press that another of his brothers, Charles, told him Bruce had committed suicide.
A woman who answered the phone at Charles Ivins’ home in Etowah, North Carolina, refused to wake him and declined to comment on his death. ”This is a grieving time,” she said.
A woman who answered the phone at Bruce Ivins’ home in Frederick declined to comment.
Justice Department spokesperson Peter Carr and FBI assistant director John Miller declined to comment on the report.
Henry Heine, a scientist who had worked with Ivins on inhalation anthrax research at Fort Detrick, said he and others on their team have testified before a federal grand jury in Washington that has been
investigating the anthrax mailings for more than a year.
Heine declined to comment on Ivins’ death.
Norman Covert, a retired Fort Detrick spokesperson who served with Ivins on an animal-care and protocol committee, said Ivins was ”a very intent guy” at their meetings.
Ivins was the co-author of numerous anthrax studies, including one on a treatment for inhalation anthrax published in the July 7 issue of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
Just last month, the government exonerated another scientist at the Fort Detrick lab, Steven Hatfill, who had been identified by the FBI as a ”person of interest” in the anthrax attacks. The government paid
Hatfill $5,82-million to settle a lawsuit he filed against the Justice Department in which he claimed the department violated his privacy rights by speaking with reporters about the case.
The Times said federal investigators moved away from Hatfill and concluded Ivins was the culprit after FBI director Robert Mueller changed leadership of the investigation in 2006. The new investigators
instructed agents to re-examine leads and reconsider potential suspects. In the meantime, investigators made progress in analysing anthrax powder recovered from letters addressed to two US senators,
according to the report.
Besides the five deaths, 17 people were sickened by anthrax that was mailed to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and members of the news media in New York and Florida just weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The victims included postal workers and others who came into contact with the anthrax.
In January 2002, the FBI doubled the reward for helping solve the case to $2,5-million, and by June officials said the agency was scrutinising 20 to 30 scientists who might have had the knowledge and
opportunity to send the anthrax letters. – Sapa-AP