FBI confirm second Anthrax letter sent to a US senator

Anthrax has been posted to a second US senator the FBI have confirmed.

The letter was sent to Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont who is the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee.

The discovery was made as investigators sifted through unopened mail from Capitol Hill that has been under quarantine since postal workers were diagnosed with inhaled anthrax.

The contaminated letter was postmarked from Trenton, New Jersey, as was a previous one sent to Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and contained similar handwriting.

"FBI and US Postal Service investigators examining sequestered congressional mail have found another letter which appears to contain anthrax," the FBI said.

The letter was postmarked October 9 in Trenton and "appears in every respect to be similar to the other anthrax-laced letters," a statement said.

Hazardous materials experts began the process of sorting the quarantined congressional mail earlier this week at a facility in northern Virginia.

Further testing will now be conducted in an effort to confirm the presence of anthrax and examine its contents to compare it with that found in the other letters.

Traces of anthrax have been found in about a dozen senators' offices in the Hart Senate office building across the street from the Capitol. That building remains closed for cleaning with chlorine dioxide gas.

Leahy's office is in a different building, but it's not clear where the letter was when mail deliveries to Congress were ceased on October 15.