After suicide, prosecutors reveal circumstantial anthrax case

By Marisa Taylor and Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — A top Justice Department official said Wednesday that investigators are confident that government scientist Bruce Ivins, who behaved erratically and was treated for mental illness before committing suicide last week, "was the only person involved" in the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that killed five people and terrorized the nation.

With the public disclosure of hundreds of pages of documents, the FBI and the Justice Department hoped to quell a week of media speculation about whether Ivins, 62, a former microbiologist at the U.S. Army's biological weapons research center at Fort Detrick, Md., was the culprit and whether they had sufficient evidence to prove it.