FBI, Postal Service Offer $1M Reward

WASHINGTON (AP) - The FBI and U.S. Postal Service on Thursday offered an award up to $1 million for information leading to the arrest of those who sent anthrax through the mail. Investigators continued to link the various incidents through evidence.

``Once again we call upon the public to assist us in this fight against terrorism,'' FBI director Robert Mueller said in a joint announcement with Postmaster General Jack Potter.

Mueller said the reward would be for ``information leading to the arrest and conviction for terrorist acts of mailing anthrax.''

Potter urged citizens to use commonsense caution if they receive suspicious packages, and said his service was mailing postcards to all mail recipients with guidelines. ``The best defense that we have right now is an educated American public,'' he said.

Authorities announced that four people had been charged with federal felonies for anthrax hoaxes. ``We intend to prosecute these hoaxes to the fullest extent of the law,'' Attorney General John Ashcroft said.

Ashcroft said among those who have been charged was a man who sent talcum powder through the mail, saying it was anthrax.

The announcements came as authorities pressed to identify the source of the anthrax and to find possible links between the cases that have cropped up in Washington, New York and Florida. Five people are confirmed to have anthrax, and authorities were examining a possible sixth case. Many more have tested positive for exposure to the bacterium.

A preliminary match was made between anthrax found at American Media Inc., a tabloid newspaper publisher where one man died from the contamination and another is hospitalized, and anthrax sent to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw.

Officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the strain - one of hundreds of varieties of anthrax - occurs naturally and is found domestically in hoofed animals such as cows and deer. Further tests must be done to determine if the strains came from the same source.

The letter to Brokaw was postmarked Sept. 16 from Trenton, N.J. Investigators believe the Florida man who died of anthrax may have contracted the disease from a letter that was destroyed before he became sick. His last day at work was Sept. 26.

Still unknown is whether anthrax found in a letter sent to Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., is the same strain as the Florida and New York material.

The anthrax found in Daschle's office was ``professionally made,'' meaning it was manipulated and possibly refined with additives to keep the particle size small enough so that it's more likely to waft and be inhaled, said a federal terrorism expert, speaking on condition of anonymity. Inhaled anthrax is the most deadly form of the disease.

Here it is from the Orlando Sentinel:

Teenager charged in anthrax hoax By Sandra Mathers | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted October 18, 2001

James Smith, a class cutup and "social butterfly," was just trying to get out of school for the day when he poured a white substance on a chair in his classroom Tuesday at Flagler Palm Coast High School, said his mother, Peggy Smith.

Instead, the powder -- a common over-the-counter headache remedy -- landed the junior in juvenile jail and at the forefront of a growing number of anthrax scares popping up around the state. Several thousand calls about suspicious letters and packages have been received by law-enforcement officials statewide.

On Wednesday, a 14-year-old student at Galaxy Middle School in Deltona was charged with disrupting a school, a misdemeanor. Authorities said the boy, whose name was withheld, spread a white powder -- later found to be Kool-Aid -- in a bathroom and on a water fountain in the eighth-grade building.

Smith, 17, is thought to be the first person in Florida charged with carrying out an anthrax hoax under the state's year-old hoax weapons law. He is charged with a second-degree felony of "using a hoax weapon of mass destruction."

If he is prosecuted as an adult, he could be sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in prison. Flagler County Assistant State Attorney Steve Nelson said he could not comment on how Smith's case would be handled until he has reviewed the case.

Smith told school and law-enforcement officials that he placed BC Powder on a chair in the back of a classroom as a joke because he did not want to go to class Tuesday, according to an arrest report.The hoax occurred on the same day Gov. Jeb Bush and state law-enforcement officials vowed to crack down on those making false anthrax threats.

"Their age isn't going to be a factor in whether they are arrested. They're going to be arrested," said Ken Tucker, director of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Jacksonville. "We are going to insist they be prosecuted."

That's what Peggy Smith says terrifies her.

"I feel they are going to make an example out of him," she said Wednesday in a phone interview. "He told them it was BC. They blew it up more than it should be."

She said her son is "a typical 17-year-old" who played a practical joke without considering the consequences. He has had one prior run-in with the law, she said. He is on probation for two traffic citations, an improper lane change and driving with a learner's permit without an adult in the car, she said.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.