Posted on 12/06/2001 3:31:03 PM PST by t-shirt
INS detainee anthrax suspect
TRACY KENNEDY, Register Citizen Staff December 06, 2001
HARTFORD - A Hartford judge set bail Wednesday for one of four local men detained by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service since Nov. 25 for their suspected involvement in the deadly national anthrax mailings. At Immigration Court, Judge Michael W. Straus ordered Mohammed I. Khan, 46, of Torrington, to pay $12,000 bail during a hearing regarding his application for asylum. Kahn reportedly filed the application after arriving in this country from Pakistan in 1993. According to an INS representative, he had not posted the bail by late afternoon Wednesday.
According to published reports, Khan and three other men, Najmul Hasan, 33, of Winsted, Ifran Ahmed, 36, and Ayazuddin Sheerazi, 32, both of Torrington, were arrested by local police and FBI agents after a tip from Torrington resident Robert Janco.
Janco told authorities and "America's Most Wanted," a nationally syndicated television show, that he believed Kahn and Hasan were involved in the recent anthrax scares. According to published reports, Janco told police he overheard the men talking on Sept. 8 about delivering letters to a Vietnamese immigrant in New York City named "Kathy." When Janco heard of the death of 61-year-old Kathy Nguyen on Oct. 31, he reportedly contacted the police.
According to source at the immigration court, charging documents have not been filed against Kahn or the other men and they are solely being detained on immigration matters.
Gary Cote, acting deputy district director of INS in Boston, would not comment on the investigation or confirm the men were being detained by the immigration agency. "I cannot discuss that or what action is being taken if any action is being taken concerning these men," he said Wednesday. Cote explained his office could not discuss any actions concerning immigrants that may be involved in national terrorist activities pursuant to a directive received from the Attorney General.
However, according to prison records checked on Wednesday, Khan, Ahmed and Hasan are currently incarcerated in Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers, and Sheerazi is being held at Hartford Correctional Center in Hartford.
Court dates have not yet been set for Ahmed and Hasan, and Sheerazi is scheduled to appear at a hearing on Wednesday in the immigration court in Hartford concerning his application to extend his visa.
During Kahn's hearing on Wednesday, Assistant District Council Attorney John Marley indicated he would oppose Kahn's application for asylum based on Kahn's alleged failure to report his residence in Torrington.
Kahn, a native of Pakistan, said that while he works in Torrington, he still maintains his residence on Neptune Street in Brooklyn, N.Y., as indicated on his immigration documents.
And your government take real action to stop the terror!
Deport and/or arrest all illegal aliens and terror linked foriegners as the laws require! No more new anti-terror/bioterror laws needed to do that! If in some cases you don't have enough to arrest and hold them, deport them!
And re-arm the US pilots as they were before the despicable anti-American 1968 Gun Control Act was passed!
And remember not to give up any of your God-given rights for false promises that you will get more security by doing so.
And way to go citizen Robert Janco!
The price of liberty is eternal vigilence.
Experts differ on foreign role in anthrax attacks
December 5, 2001
WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI's profile of the anthrax killer as a deranged loner "is a lot of hokum," the former head of the U.N. weapons inspection program in Iraq said Wednesday.
The anthrax sent in the attacks "is not the kind of thing you mess around with in a university lab," Dr. Richard Spertzel told reporters. He later told a congressional panel that the tainted letters were likely the result of terrorism sponsored by a foreign government.
Spertzel's testimony was challenged by Dr. Kenneth Alibek, a Soviet defector who was a top official in that country's biological weapons program.
"I would say preliminarily that they are not very highly trained professionals," Alibek said of whoever sent the anthrax letters. "It could be home-grown or foreign. I cannot answer this question.''
"It was a primitive process, but it was a workable process,'' Alibek said of the anthrax. He said he has reviewed photographs of some of the anthrax mailed to the news media and to politicians.
Spertzel and Alibek appeared before the House International Relations Committee, along with Elisa Harris, who said she was ``more skeptical" than Spertzel that the attacks were acts of state-sponsored terrorism. Harris served for eight years on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.
Spertzel said the sophisticated process required to prepare anthrax for weapons use "tends to argue against a home-grown terrorist, unless someone is in the Western desert where nobody is around." Preparing anthrax for weapons use in most laboratories would endanger people in the vicinity and expose the anthrax killer to scrutiny, Spertzel said.
The FBI has said the sender is likely an adult male, and if employed, may work in a laboratory, is apparently comfortable working with an extremely hazardous material, and has access to equipment needed to refine anthrax.
When the FBI released the profile of the anthrax killer nearly a month ago, the bureau emphasized that "No suspects are ruled out. No groups are ruled out. There's a possibility it's Al Qaeda-related," but said "there is no direct or clear linkage between this incident and any cell or network
Gack!
And Take note in this opne the Govt and Nationalmedia are still trying to blame it on a "Lone American" (right-Winger)--(Forget the evidence we at FBI want to blame some American no matter what!)
----
FBI Opens Anthrax-Tainted Leahy Letter
December 6, 2001 6:31 pm EST
By Deborah Charles
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. forensic experts have opened an anthrax-tainted letter sent to Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy and are beginning a series of tests in an effort to discover who is responsible for the germ attacks that have killed five people.
FBI officials said on Thursday the letter was taken out of the envelope in a controlled environment at the Army's Ft. Detrick, Maryland, biomedical research laboratory. They have started a number of tests on the letter and its contents.
"Investigators are hopeful that the results of those tests -- expected in the coming days and weeks -- will yield clues which will bring us closer to identifying who is responsible for the anthrax attacks," the FBI said in a statement.
Pictures of the letter show it is virtually identical, with the same writing and text, to another anthrax-laden letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. It says: "You can not stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great."
The Leahy letter, like the one sent to Daschle, was postmarked from Trenton, New Jersey, on Oct. 9 and dated Sept. 11 -- the same day 19 hijackers crashed commercial airplanes into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 4,000 people.
Although there were fears that the spate of anthrax letters -- also sent to three media outlets -- were an extension of the Sept. 11 attacks, FBI officials have said they believe the person who wrote the letters was an "opportunist" who took advantage of the confusion that followed the September attacks.
Investigators believe one person wrote all of the letters and information gathered so far indicates they were an act of domestic rather than international terrorism.
CAREFUL PROCESS
Van Harp, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Washington field office, said the process of analyzing the Leahy letter -- which provides the best evidence yet of all the anthrax letters -- will be slow and methodical.
Photographs on the FBI's Web site (www.fbi.gov) showed the letter being opened by person whose hands were in gloves that opened into an encased bubble. The person opened the plastic that held the letter, cut open the envelope then used tweezers to pull out the letter.
"There were a number of precautions that were taken very deliberately, and that was to maximize again our ability to analyze and benefit from this letter," he said. "It was opened under a controlled secure sterile environment in which we controlled motion and air."
"Our objective -- we hope to learn in the final analysis, literally, who did this and how they did it," he said.
Eighteen people have been infected with anthrax and five have died from the inhalation form of the disease since early October.
The letter addressed to Leahy, a Democrat like Daschle and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was discovered on Nov. 16 among 280 barrels of mail addressed to Capitol Hill that were set aside for examination after the Daschle letter was opened and found to contain anthrax.
Initial tests performed after the letter was discovered showed it contained a highly lethal amount of anthrax.
Authorities have said the letter to Leahy may have been misrouted through the State Department mail system before being sent to the Senate, possibly infecting a State Department employee, who has since recovered from his illness.
Nobody but the liberal media and their captive audience ever believed for a minute that the anthrax attack was the work of domestic "right wingers".
Good find, T.
-----------------
Bipartisan Bioterror Bill Unveiled in House
December 6, 2001 3:28 pm EST
By Joanne Kenen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Spurred into action by the Sept. 11 attacks and a series of deadly anthrax letters, U.S. House members on Thursday unveiled a bipartisan bill calling for roughly $3 billion to improve bioterrorism preparedness and said the full House could vote as soon as next week.
"In a post-Sept. 11 world, we are more acutely aware of our nation's vulnerability to bioterrorist attack than ever before," said Louisiana Republican Rep. Billy Tauzin, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who released an outline of the bill along with the committee's top Democrat, Rep. John Dingell of Michigan.
Sens. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, have introduced similar though not identical legislation in the Senate.
Despite ongoing partisan conflict about how to fund all the post-Sept. 11 emergency needs, there is broad bipartisan support in both the House and Senate for significant investment in bioterror preparedness.
The Bush administration has asked for $1.5 billion, with most of that going to increase national stockpiles of antibiotics and vaccines, including an accelerated and expanded plan to have enough smallpox vaccine to immunize every American in a crisis.
The Tauzin-Dingell bill similarly gives about $1 billion for that national stockpile but it calls for another $1 billion for states, local governments, and other health-care providers to improve their ability to respond. That also includes money to develop new treatments and vaccines.
It also gives the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention $450 million, which has been at the heart of the response to the recent anthrax attack through the mail, to expand its bioterror programs and modernize its own aging labs.
Tauzin and Dingell also establish a national database of dangerous pathogens, and impose new rules for registering 36 most deadly biological agents. As the anthrax investigation has progressed slowly, many in Congress were stunned to learn how little health officials or law enforcement agents knew about how many people or labs had substances like anthrax or who they were.
The bill also dedicates $100 million so the Food and Drug Administration can step up inspection of imported foods, and gives a similar amount to safeguard the water supply. (Additional reporting by Randy Fabi)
Sounds to me like TRIMPOTUS is involved. This is just one of those ordinary bureaucratic postal delivery errors that happens from time to time.
And only $12,000!!! Something is not right with this equation.
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.