FBI links senate anthrax letters

The FBI believes an anthrax-laced letter to US Senator Patrick Leahy, belatedly found last week, was written by the same person who sent a tainted letter to Senator Tom Daschle last month.

Investigators said yesterday they were also looking into the possibility that the letter to Leahy was misdirected, which could have been the source of anthrax contamination at a State Department mail centre that made one worker ill.

Two Washington Senate office buildings struck by the anthrax scare reopened, and US health experts helped authorities in Chile who found a new letter that may contain anthrax.

Tom Skinner, spokesman for the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said the agency was planning to test a substance found in a letter that the Chilean government said was tainted with anthrax.

The government of Chile said the letter came from Switzerland.

US Postal inspector Dan Mihalko said the Leahy letter contained a handwritten postal code that could have been misread by optical character reader machines at the postal service.

‘‘It raises an interesting possibility that the letter to Leahy could have been misdirected through the State Department mail system, which might explain how that system got contaminated,’’ said Mihalko.

The Leahy letter was found on Friday by the FBI and hazardous materials staff from the Environmental Protection Agency in one of 280 barrels of unopened mail sent to Capitol Hill and held since the discovery of the letter to Daschle.

The outside of the Leahy letter appears virtually identical to the Daschle letter and bears the same fictitious ‘‘Greendale School’’ return address, all-capital block letters with a slight slant to the right and a postmark from Trenton, New Jersey.

Investigators are convinced the two letters were ‘‘sent by the same person’’, the FBI says.

Two of three Senate office buildings reopened yesterday after being swept for anthrax contamination. The Hart Senate office building remained closed.

Environmental Protection Agency officials have said it will take three to four weeks to decontaminate the offices of 10 senators in the Hart building in which traces of anthrax have been found, a Senate aide said.

Those clean-ups have not yet started.

The FBI said all congressional mail set aside after discovery of the Daschle letter had been inspected, and the Leahy letter was the only suspicious piece.

No Senate or House member or aide has contracted anthrax, and congressional business largely returned to normal.

Four people have died from anthrax - two Washington postal workers, a hospital employee in New York City and a British-born newspaper picture editor in Florida.