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As published by MSNBC.com:
Tests confirm ricin in Senate mailroom
Deadly poison was found in office of Senate Majority Leader Frist
NBC, MSNBC and news services
Updated: 1:22 p.m. ET Feb. 03, 2004
WASHINGTON — Tests have confirmed that a white powder found in a mailroom in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s office is the deadly poison ricin, the Tennessee Republican announced Tuesday. Three Senate office buildings remained closed as other mail was removed for testing.
Frist, addressing his colleagues on the Senate floor, said that “a series of tests of varying specificity” confirmed the presence of ricin in the mailroom of his office in the Dirksen Senate Building.
He said that tests indicated that the poison had been confined to the mailroom.
“All air sampling and all environmental studies today are negative with the exception of what was found in that single office at that site,” Frist said.
“Somebody in all likelihood manufactured this with intent to harm,” he said as the Senate prepared to open debate on a $317 billion highway bill. “This is a criminal investigation,” Frist said.
CDC officials encouraged
The Centers for Disease Control said officials were encouraged that none of the police officers and workers who went through a decontamination process on Monday had been sickened.
“As each minute ticks by, we are less and less concerned about the health effects,” Dr. Julie Gerberding, the CDC director, said in Atlanta. If the ricin were pure, she said, “We would expect very early onset.”
Police initially said that 16 workers had been decontaminated, but on Tuesday Senate aides told The Associated Press that between 40 and 50 staff members and Capitol Police officers were briefly quarantined and decontaminated.
Frist, who normally uses his Capitol majority leader’s office instead of the Dirksen office, was not in the building at the time.
President Bush was briefed on the situation, and the administration established an interagency team to investigate.
Symptoms of ricin poisoning include a suddenly developed fever, cough and excess fluid in the lungs, a fact sheet from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. These symptoms could be followed by severe breathing problems and possibly death, the CDC said. There is no known antidote.
Twice as deadly as cobra venom, ricin, which is derived from the castor bean plant, is relatively easily made and can be inhaled, ingested or injected.
Capitol Police advised lawmakers not to open any mail as they checked all three Senate office buildings. After on-site testing, authorities planned to remove and test all mail that has been delivered there, congressional sources said.
A senior government investigator, who spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said the powdery substance was found in an area where mail is opened in Frist’s office but had not yet been traced to any specific piece of mail.
“The assumption is it must have come from mail but we can’t say for sure it is from mail,” the investigator said.
Efforts to determine potency
The investigator said both field tests and some lab tests had confirmed the substance was ricin but more sophisticated tests were being done to determine how potent the particular substance is.
Another federal law enforcement official said that no extortion or threat letter was found in the area. Most of the mail in that part of the office came from Frist's home state of Tennessee, the official said.
Meanwhile, postal inspectors were investigating a second incident in which an unidentified powder was found at a Connecticut postal sorting center in an envelope addressed to the Republican National Committee.
In the investigation of the powder sent to Frist’s office, officials said Monday that several preliminary tests — but not all of them — indicated it was ricin, a deadly poison. More definitive test results by the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland were received late Monday and announced Tuesday by Frist.
The closures of the three main Senate buildings forced the cancellation of committee meetings scheduled for those buildings, though the Capitol remained open, and the Senate convened Tuesday morning as scheduled.
Building entrances were locked. A simple “Closed” sign was tacked onto one of the main, ornate doors of the Dirksen office building. Through a window of the Dirksen building a pile of red, plastic bags could be seen in the hallway. Yellow sheets were erected to cordon off areas off the hall. Elsewhere, a Senate staffer carried plastic bags from the building.
Some senators opened temporary work areas in the Capitol. Staffers for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., retreated to a room in the Capitol basement known as the “hideaway.” They had used it during the anthrax scare in 2001.
‘An odd sense of deja vu’
“There’s sort of an odd sense of deja vu with the anthrax and that this is happening again,” said Tessa Hafen, a spokeswoman for Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the senate’s No. 2 Democrat. “But people here are working.”
Meantime, postal authorities were investigating an envelope addressed to the RNC that was found late Monday night at the Wallingford postal sorting center in suburban Hartford, Conn. Police and postal officials described the substance as a gray, sandy powder that was leaking out of a pre-paid, pre-printed fund-raising envelope addressed to the RNC’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. There was no return address.
Test results on the substance were expected later Tuesday.
The Wallingford center is the same Connecticut postal facility where anthrax spores were found in 2001. A 94-year-old Oxford woman, Ottilie Lundgren, died after inhaling the bacteria, one of five people who died nationwide in the anthrax attacks that fall. Investigators believe she got anthrax through mail that passed through the Wallingford sorting center.
Preliminary test results on the new Wallingford sample were inconclusive and officials took the powder to the state Department of Public Health laboratory in Hartford for further testing. The results were expected late Tuesday morning.
“It could potentially be a hoax. There’s really no explanation I can think of for a grayish powder to be in that kind of an envelope,” said Hal Stephens, a supervisor for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Connecticut.
Investigators believe the letter was mailed from somewhere in Connecticut.
The worker who found the powder was wearing gloves, officials said.
‘All the employees are fine’
“All the employees are fine,” said Carl Walton, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service in Connecticut. “Nobody needed medical treatment. They washed up and went home.”
Matt Fritz, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, said there was no apparent environmental risk at the facility. DEP officials cleared the scene at about 4 a.m.
The facility remained open Tuesday morning, police said.
Frist gave no indication that extra security had been ordered for the Capitol complex, although security in the area has been high since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Mail to congressional offices has been irradiated since the 2001 anthrax attack, but Frist said radiation is unlikely to have an effect on ricin.
Democrat Tom Daschle of South Dakota was majority leader in 2001 when deadly anthrax was found in letters sent to his office and the office of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., in the Hart Senate Office Building. No one was ever arrested in those incidents.
Hundreds of Capitol workers, reporters and tourists who were in the Hart building lined up for tests and doses of Cipro and other antibiotics after the anthrax attack. Areas of that building were closed for months for decontamination.
In October, a package containing ricin was found at a postal facility serving Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport in South Carolina.
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