Bruce E. Ivins may not have been the anthrax killer, but scientific, postal and investigative evidence painstakingly compiled by federal agents and released yesterday points strongly to his guilt, as declared by the FBI. The case, detailed by prosecutors and investigators, is circumstantial - there are no witnesses or incriminating statements about the attack that killed five people and terrorized the nation in 2001. But it presents a plausible portrait of Mr. Ivins as the mastermind and sole perpetrator of the first bioterrorist attack in the United States .
Mr. Ivins' suicide last week prevents a conclusive resolution of the 7-year-old case. But the decision by U.S. prosecutors, the FBI and postal inspectors to reveal key aspects of their case in the absence of an indictment dispels some of the mystery in this true-life whodunit and redeems, in part, the FBI's initial mishandling of the case. It was an extraordinary move by federal officials, driven by Mr. Ivins' death and the public's reaction to it. Colleagues of Mr. Ivins, an anthrax researcher at the Army's biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick, said they wouldn't believe the scientist was behind the attacks without proof. Others raised concerns that Mr. Ivins was a convenient suspect now that the government had wrongly pursued a former Detrick researcher, Steven J. Hatfill, for years.
