FBI had, then tossed anthrax type used in attacks

FBI Assistant Director Vahid Majidi said Monday the initial anthrax sample that Ivins took from his Army lab in February 2002 and gave investigators did not meet court-ordered conditions for its preparation and collection.

In a briefing for reporters, Majidi said the sample kept at the FBI lab was destroyed because the bureau believed it might not have been allowed as evidence at trial.

"Looking at hindsight, obviously we would do things differently today," Majidi said.

Ivins, 62, took a fatal dose of acetaminophen last month as prosecutors prepared to indict him for murder.

He gave investigators a second sample of anthrax from his lab in April 2002 to comply with standards in a subpoena issued in the case. But that sample contained a different strain than what he submitted two months earlier in what prosecutors call an attempt to deceive or confuse investigators.

Majidi, who heads the FBI office in charge of investigating weapons of mass destruction, led a panel of government and private-sector scientists who detailed the scientific case against Ivins. They credited new ways of looking at the DNA of anthrax to whittle the list of labs and suspects who could have produced it.

That science, which let investigators look for tiny genetic mutations in the kind of anthrax used in the attacks, was only becoming available around 2004 when the FBI seized more samples from the Army's biodefense lab at Fort Detrick, Md., Majidi said. Not until then were investigators able to trace strains of genetically unique anthrax back to Ivins, he said.

As part of the February 2002 subpoena, Ivins gave investigators two samples of the unique Ames anthrax strain known as RMR-1029 that he created in his lab. One went to the FBI lab, where it was destroyed. The other went to the lab of Dr. Paul Keim, a geneticist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Ariz.

Keim still had his RMR-1029 sample in 2006 when the FBI realized it could match Ivins to two batches of anthrax-laced letters that were mailed in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The anthrax letters killed five and sickened 17 after turning up on Capitol Hill, in newsrooms and postal facilities.