[MilCom] U.S. Prepared to Fight Anthrax

[Chris Corley]

Official: U.S. Prepared to Fight Anthrax
March 01, 2005 3:49 PM EST
LYON, France - The United States is better prepared today to protect Americans against an anthrax attack like the ones that killed five people and terrorized the country in 2001, a senior U.S. Postal Service security official told The Associated Press Tuesday.

That's not the case in other countries, however, with the world's police ill-equipped to handle an "urgent" bioterrorism threat even as al-Qaida pursues chemical and biological weapons development, said other officials at an Interpol conference here.

In America, anthrax identification equipment is part of a new biohazard detection system now running in nearly 100 of the country's 283 mail processing facilities - with the remainder to be installed by November, said Zane M. Hill, the inspector in charge of the U.S. Postal Service's dangerous mail and homeland security division.

The equipment can stop an anthrax-laced letter, meaning that, "all the employees there would be protected and nobody in the public would get sick," Hill said in an AP interview on the sidelines of the conference devoted to bioterrorism.

The threat of a bioterrorism attack has been a growing concern since the Sept. 11, 2001 strikes against the United States by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin revealed that al-Qaida pursued development of chemical and biological weapons after U.S. attack on bin Laden's militants in Afghanistan.

While Afghanistan was under Taliban control, al-Qaida militants trained in how to develop and use biological materials, including ricin and botulism, de Villepin told the gathering.

"More recently, after the fall of the Taliban, these groups pursued their work in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge," de Villepin said, an area in the former Soviet republic that Moscow says is a refuge for Chechen militants and international terrorists.

He didn't say how recently the efforts were detected but, separately, said: "Today, we know that certain terrorist groups have tried to get their hands on chemical and biological agents."

"The threat must be taken seriously," he added.

Interpol Secretary-General Ronald K. Noble warned that al-Qaida has stated its intention to use biological weapons and has posted instructions for making them on the Internet.

"The threat of bioterrorism is real," Noble told the conference, billed as the largest meeting of police with more than 500 police and counterterrorism officials from 155 countries.

Interpol is based in the southeastern city of Lyon.

"There is no criminal threat with greater potential danger to all countries, regions and people in the world than the threat of bioterrorism," Noble said.

"And there is no crime area where the police generally have as little training than in preventing - or responding to - bioterrorist attacks," he added.

South African Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi, who is also Interpol's president, singled out the possibility of an attack on the international food chain and livestock - a threat he said was receiving "relatively little" attention.

"This is not science fiction," he said, "but a call for urgent prevention."

During the two-day meeting, police were examining past terrorist incidents, including the anthrax-by-mail incidents in the United States and the 1995 sarin attacks in the Tokyo subway. Talks were also focusing on how to better prevent and prepare for threats and training police to handle them.

Senior officials at the meeting include those from the New York Police Department and London's Metropolitan Police, as well as from Canada, Malaysia, Russia and Singapore.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, international cooperation has improved. Now 117 countries contribute to Interpol's global database of names and photographs of suspected terrorists, Selebi said. The database, which had information on 2,202 people in 2001, now has the names and pictures of more than 8,000 suspects. Another database for stolen travel documents that was launched in 2002 with 3,150 entries now has more than 5.5 million.

However, gaps remain.

De Villepin said countries needed to pool information from their biotech labs, security agencies and hospitals to better track terrorist threats and know where to turn for help.

Noble noted two shortcomings that could hinder a fast response to a biological attack. He said police need a worldwide list of scientists and health experts who could be consulted in an emergency and a high-tech system whereby one police force could alert others around the world of a terrorist threat.

The U.S. Postal service, for example, could have responded faster and more effectively to the deadly anthrax attacks had there been a system in place that allowed for immediate coordination with scientists and other experts, said Hill.

"We didn't know about the science or a lot about the health risk," said Hill. "We learned that as we went."