(KRT) Confirming a clear link between the terrorists targeting America and the South Florida company hit by anthrax cases, the FBI said Sunday that The Sun tabloid editor’s wife rented a Delray Beach, Fla., apartment to two of the hijackers killed in the Sept. 11 suicide missions.
The Sun is part of the American Media Inc. tabloid chain, and it employed photo editor Bob Stevens, who died earlier this month from inhaled anthrax. Two other AMI employees were exposed, and five more are being retested to confirm positive blood test results.
Sun editor Michael Irish’s wife, Gloria, rented Unit 1504 at the Delray Racquet Club, 755 Dotterel Road, to Marwan Alshehhi and Saeed Alghamdi this summer, said FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela.
Alshehhi was aboard the second jet to strike the World Trade Center. Alghamdi was on the flight that crashed 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
But Orihuela said the FBI wasn’t drawing immediate conclusions.
“Right now it looks like a coincidence,” Orihuela said from outside the tabloid’s Boca Raton headquarters. “We are not searching the apartment at this time. We are focusing on this building.”
In other developments Sunday, three more anthrax exposures were reported from a letter received at NBC in New York, and four Microsoft workers who came in contact with a contaminated letter in Nevada tested negative for infection. The exposures in New York were to a police officer who handled the letter, and two lab technicians.
In South Florida, the apartment connection marks the most direct link to date between the terrorist hijackers and the AMI anthrax cases.
The Delray apartment in question is central to a massive federal investigation into the terrorist attacks. Two terrorists, Alshehhi and Alghamdi, rented the apartment in Delray Beach just north of Boca Raton, the FBI said. The other seven, including suspected ringleader Mohamed Atta, are connected because they visited the apartment or otherwise had a direct tie to the inhabitants, said a federal official familiar with the investigation.
It is clear that the apartment was a meeting ground for terrorists, authorities say. Now they must determine whether unit 1504 was also a hatching ground for the anthrax attacks.
In addition to Stevens and the two other workers who were exposed to the bacteria, AMI general counsel Michael Kahane said, five people tested positive for anthrax antibodies, which indicates that at some point in their lives they were exposed. But officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the findings are preliminary and that more tests are necessary. Authorities said that none displayed symptoms, and all were being treated with antibiotics.
As a search for clues continues in South Florida and the number of anthrax exposures grows across the country, investigators and experts are grappling with whether the cases are the work of the Sept. 11 terrorists.
One of the nation’s leading biological warfare researchers said Sunday that the appearance of multiple anthrax infections suggests the possibility of a bioterrorist attack.
“The level of suspicion is high for me, though it’s still open for me whether it’s a bioterrorist attack,” said C.J. Peters, former chief of special pathogens at the CDC in Atlanta. Peters, now a professor of microbiology and coauthor of the 1997 book “Virus Hunter,” said his suspicion may turn to certainty if strains of the bacteria found in Florida, New York and Nevada are the same.
A federal official familiar with the investigation into the attacks said that prior to the New York exposures, investigators were treating the Boca Raton incident as an “isolated criminal case.”
But with the New York and Nevada cases, the same official shifted gears: “Maybe there is a concerted conspiracy connected to the Sept. 11 attacks.”