WASHINGTON (AFP) — US federal agents are wrapping up their investigation into the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks there, convinced that a microbiologist who committed suicide last week was the lone culprit.
But Bruce Ivins' attorneys continued to insist on his innocence, describing the government case against him as a masterpiece of innuendo.
Ivins, 62, killed himself as prosecutors were preparing to charge him in the attacks that killed five people and left 17 others sick.
"Based upon the totality of the evidence we had gathered against him, we are confident that Dr. Ivins was the only person responsible for these attacks," US attorney Jeffrey Taylor told reporters Wednesday.
The attacks, which came in the weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, disrupted the US postal service for months and raised fears that the Al-Qaeda network was armed with biological weapons.
During the seven-year-long investigation the authorities had at one point mistakenly named another scientist as a "person of interest" in the case.
But investigators said they began focusing on Ivins as a suspect last year after new forensic science allowed them to trace the anthrax back to him.
They concluded that the anthrax mailed to prominent journalists and politicians in 2001 must have come from a single flask of parent spores that Ivins had created and which he alone had maintained.
In a strange twist, Ivins, who worked for 18 years at the US biodefense research laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had been working on a vaccine against the disease that same year, Taylor said.
Taylor painted a picture of a deeply troubled scientist.
"Ivins had a history of mental health problems and was facing a difficult time professionally in the summer and fall of 2001 because an anthrax vaccine he was working on was failing," Taylor said.
In one email to a co-worker, Ivins stated that he had "incredible paranoid delusional thoughts at times" and feared he might not be able to control his behaviour, Taylor said.
Ivins had recently made a threat during a group therapy session to kill people who had "wronged him" after learning he might be indicted in the case, he added.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday released documents from their investigation, code-named Amerithrax, including search warrants, police reports and anonymous letters.
The documents detailed what the FBI said was Ivins' obsession with Princeton University's Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, which dated to the late 1970s, when he was a post-doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The sorority has an office near the Princeton University mailbox where letters containing anthrax were mailed in 2001.
"There is ample evidence in this case pointing to Dr. Ivins as the individual who drove to Princeton to mail those letters," said Taylor.
But Ivins' attorneys insist their late client was innocent.
"The government's press conference was an orchestrated dance of carefully worded statements, heaps of innuendo and a staggering lack of real evidence -- all contorted to create the illusion of guilt by Dr. Ivins," his attorneys, Paul Kemp and Thomas DeGonia, said in a statement.
Since Ivins' death on July 29, friends and colleagues have described him as a model citizen who played guitar in his church folk group, was an avid gardener and was an active volunteer with the Red Cross.
He was also said to be a loving father and husband to his wife of 33 years, Diane, and their 24-year-old twins.
Before the evidence was made public, FBI Director Robert Mueller met Wednesday with survivors and relatives of the victims for two hours to talk about the information.
The announcement comes one month after the Justice Department paid six million dollars as compensation to Stephen Hatfield, another scientist who they had earlier fingered as a "person of interest" in the case.
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