Anthrax strain traced to '93 plot
...the unsuccessful "weapon" chosen by a doomsday cult in Japan that two years later killed 12 and sickened thousands by releasing nerve gas in a subway station.
An Arizona researcher told colleagues about the 1993 anthrax attack in Japan at Sunday's session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual convention in Denver.
....simplified the task of tracking the source of the anthrax used by Japan's Aum Shinri Kyo cult members in the summer of 1993. In that case, the anthrax matched a sample already in an anthrax database created to help track the former Soviet Union's supplies.
Japanese public health authorities had been tipped off about an eight-story concrete building the cult owned in a crowded area of Tokyo. Neighbors lodged 160 complaints about a terrible stench coming from the building, Keim said.
Public health officials investigated. They snapped photos of a smoke plume rising from the building's roof and scraped slime samples that had oozed down its walls. But they couldn't get inside the doors. Their worry: the fearsome cult and its psychotic leader were boiling the bodies of assassination victims.
"It seems like you could get a search warrant for that," Keim said.
As it turned out, the cult was growing anthrax in the basement in a vat and was pumping it from the building's roof. Meanwhile, cloaked in the banality of a white utility van with special vents, the cult spewed more anthrax-tinged gas through neighborhood streets.
"If authorities at the time had recognized this as a bioterrorist attack, perhaps the sarin gas attack would have never occurred," Keim said.
