FBI Searches Hatfill’s Home Again

Vacant apartment scoured for anthrax residue for third time

MSNBC
September 11, 2002
http://www.msnbc.com/news/798859.asp



FBI agents and other government investigators searched the vacant apartment of Dr. Steven Hatfill, who has been called a “person of interest” in the anthrax case, for the third time Wednesday, NBC News has learned.

Several agents wearing masks and other protective gear searched the apartment Wednesday morning looking for any possible anthrax residue, according to a neighbor of Hatfill’s and two U.S. law enforcement officials.

The neighbor said that Hatfill moved out several weeks ago and that the Frederick, Md., apartment is now vacant.

Officials said the government investigators returned to Hatfill’s apartment to try a new method of searching for anthrax spores. They said the new search does not mean that there’s renewed interest in Hatfill as a suspect in last fall’s anthrax attacks. There was no word on what, if anything, investigators found at the apartment. An FBI spokesman in Washington would not comment on the latest search.

Law enforcement officials have said Hatfill, 48, is not a suspect in the deaths of five people killed by anthrax-tainted letters. They also have said no evidence links him to the letters.

Last week, Hatfill was fired from his job as the associate director of Louisiana State University’s National Center for Biomedical Research and Training. The firing came after an e-mail from the Justice Department surfaced, ordering the university to stop him from working on federally funded projects. LSU spokesman Gene Sands said Hatfill’s firing was not related to the e-mail.

Hatfill, who recently moved to Baton Rouge, La., taught classes for the LSU center on the East Coast before getting the associate director’s job on July 1.

Hatfill’s lawyer, Victor Glasberg, wrote a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft demanding that he find the fired researcher a new job and accused the Justice Department of “inappropriate actions” in calling Hatfill a person of interest in the anthrax investigation.

Glasberg added that Hatfill is entitled to an apology. “I would encourage you to see that one is provided to him,” he wrote.

The letter also asked why Hatfill has been targeted by the Justice Department and FBI. The department had no comment.

Hatfill worked until 1999 for Fort Detrick’s Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland, the primary custodian of the virulent Ames strain of anthrax found in the anthrax letters.

NBC’s Jim Popkin and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

© 2002 MSNBC

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