New York, February 20: The mad scientist believed to be behind the deadly 2001 anthrax-letter attacks put a coded message in his missives.
The attacks, which killed five people and sickened several workers at the New York Post, included code that spelled out his hatred for the city according to a federal report, the New York Post reported today.
As the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officially closed its investigation into the anthrax case yesterday, the feds said their prime suspect, Dr Bruce Ivins – who killed himself in 2008 as the feds were about to charge him – thought the Big Apple was a rotten place and included the message “FNY” in his letters to New York media organisations.
“With respect to ‘FNY,’ according to numerous witnesses who knew him well . . . Dr Ivins had a deep hatred for New York,” investigators wrote in a report released yesterday.
The report called the “FNY” message a “verbal assault on New York” and recalled an anecdote typical of Ivins’ disdain.
“In the aftermath of 9/11, Dr Ivins sent [a former colleague] an e-mail where he essentially accused ‘typical’ New Yorkers of overplaying the tragedy and seeking attention, wondering ‘what about those folks in Oklahoma City, they deserve sympathy too’, ” the report said.
Ivins also harboured a hatred for the Yankees.
“Dr Ivins strongly associated [the former colleague] with New York,” the report said. “His communications with her . . . in the years that followed were replete with references to the New York Yankees, her favorite baseball team, not always in the kindest of terms.”
In the missives to The Post and former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, Ivins bolded some characters in the text. Investigators believe the sets of letters – ‘TTT AAT TAT” – correspond to the three-letter designations for three kinds of amino acid “codons” in DNA.
These acids also have single letter designations, that can spell out “FNY.” They can also spell out “PAT,” the name of a woman in his lab he had a crush on.
—Agencies