Decontaminated mail could hold anthrax clues

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Postal inspectors have begun examining decontaminated mail that was at the Brentwood processing facility when it was shut down after anthrax infected several workers there.

The inspectors are hoping to find clues that will help them catch the person who sent the anthrax spores through the mail. Seventeen people have contracted the potentially deadly disease -- including 10 who inhaled spores and developed inhalation anthrax, deadlier than anthrax caught by skin contact.

Four people, including two postal workers at Washington's Brentwood facility, died.

In response to the outbreak, the postal service began decontaminating mail from Brentwood.

Now, as the mail is returned to Washington, residential and commercial mail is being sorted from government mail. If any letters will offer clues as to the spores' origin, inspectors said, they likely will turn up in government mail.

Specifically, inspectors are looking at letters destined for a series of specific ZIP codes, and are searching for any other letters that may have contained anthrax spores or bore handwriting similar to that on anthrax-tainted letters already found.

About 24 truckloads of mail have been sent to Lima, Ohio, for decontamination. Some of it has returned, and has been in Washington more than a week, waiting for postal officials to find an appropriate place to examine the mail.

Postal officials also say there are still about 1 million pieces of mail in the contaminated Brentwood facility. Inspectors are trying to figure out how to package that mail so it can decontaminated and examined.

A similar investigation under way in New Jersey hasn't found "anything showing a smoking gun," Postal Inspection spokesman Dan Milhalko said. New leads are constantly examined and new people questioned, but so far nothing concrete has helped the investigation, he said.

The focus of the investigation remains in the Trenton, New Jersey, area, where letters sent to a U.S. senator and two New York media outlets were postmarked. But there has been no narrowing of the area beyond that, Milhalko said.

New traces of anthrax were found last week in four additional New Jersey post offices, but officials think they are from cross-contamination from the original three Trenton-postmarked letters.