Word: ricin
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Intelligence from the war front appears to be having an impact on security measures at home. The FBI has sent a classified intelligence bulletin to the nation's state and local law enforcement agencies advising them to be on the lookout for terrorists making toxins such as ricin and botulism. The alert, entitled "Improvised Chemical and Biological Agents," and dispatched this morning (April 2) to 18,000 law enforcement agencies via a secure electronic network, was prompted in part by the discovery of homemade biological toxins in a radical Islamist compound in northeastern Iraq that was raided...
...Recent events including the January, 2003, arrests in the United Kingdom of Algerian extremists apparently attempting to produce ricin toxin in their residences, indicate an ongoing interest among terrorists in developing improvised weapons of mass destruction," the bulletin says. It warns that ricin and other lethal agents can be easily concocted using recipes that can be found on the Internet and ingredients and equipment that can be bought from nurseries, hardware stores and mail order chemical supply houses. The bulletin cites several cases from the 1990s in which U.S. home-grown extremists and crackpots were arrested for making ricin...
...Bechler may have been linked to the herb ephedra [HEALTH, March 3]. It brings to the fore a problem that needs urgent regulatory attention. Alternative-medicine gurus and the burgeoning over-the-counter drug industry have fostered the notion that anything natural is safe. Well, the poisons strychnine, belladonna, ricin and botulin are all natural. Legislation is needed to prohibit advertising that implies "all natural ingredients" means "safe." HERMAN BIEBER Kenilworth...
...found only living quarters and a radio station. But Fareed Asasard, head of the Kurdistan Strategic Studies Center and a top official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which controls the areas around Ansar's enclave, says the lab at the camp is "very far from modern" but that ricin is made there...
...still has no idea of the extent of Saddam's bioweapons program. Iraq has never given a satisfactory accounting of the efforts of its scientists, but evidence suggests they produced at least 8,500 liters of anthrax, hundreds of thousands of liters of botulinum and a smaller amount of ricin...