THE US: Samples of anthrax and other biological warfare specimens went missing from the US army's main research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 1991, the Washington Post revealed yesterday.
While there is no evidence that the material was actually stolen, evidence of security laxity, bitter staff disharmony, and unauthorised weekend and evening experiments suggest both the opportunity and the incentive for a major breach of the sensitive facility's security.
The lapses have been revealed in internal army memos and in an affidavit sworn by a former employee who is suing for unfair dismissal. He also reveals that, contrary to previous official assurances, while working on less toxic forms of anthrax, scientists at Fort Detrick did produce the highly refined form of anthrax used in recent mail attacks in the US which killed five people.
Police have so far drawn a complete blank on the source of the letters.
The Post quoted a former worker at the complex as saying the revelations were consistent with the increasingly popular view that the recent antrax attacks were the work of a former US government researcher at the complex.
The affidavit, the contents of which were published by the Hartford Courant, was sworn by an Egyptian-American scientist, Mr Ayaad Assad, as part of his case for racial discrimination against the management at the plant where he had worked as a veterinary physiologist for 10 years before being made redundant in 1997. The scientist described security at the base at the time as "very lax".
Mr Assad, who was the subject of an anonymous denunciation to the FBI when the current scare broke and was cleared of responsibility by that organisation, says that the timing of the denunciation suggests possible foreknowledge of the attacks.
An internal investigation of the two dozen missing specimens, revealed by an audit in 1992, did not find evidence of theft but several of them remain untraced. Most were treated with toxic chemicals ahead of their supposed microscopic study but some may have still had live germs. Their disappearance also suggests that other material could have gone missing at the time, the Post claims.
The unauthorised work outside normal hours emerged when a worker noticed that someone had tampered with a device on a high-powered microscpe which was supposed to record its use. She also discovered the word "antrax 005" (sic) on a related improperly closed computer file. An investigation was inconclusive.
The US has, since 1969, renounced experimentation on the development of biological weapons and signed a convention in 1972 prohibiting such work, but has maintained a defensive research programme, largely at Fort Detrick.
Much of the work on anthrax involved the use of the "Ames" strain of the germ, that used in the attacks, but also common in other US biological research labs.
