Anthrax island could be terrorists’ mother lode

By Judith Ingram and Sergei Shargorodsky

Associated Press

MOSCOW – When Soviet military planners chose Vozrozhdeniye Island for their top-secret biological weapons testing ground a half century ago, they were attracted above all by its remoteness in the middle of the Aral Sea.

That Central Asian sea now has shrunk drastically, turning the 80-square-mile island into an 800-square-mile peninsula touching the mainland of Uzbekistan.

Vozrozhdeniye could become a “source of disease-causing materials for terrorists worldwide,” the opposition Republican People’s Party of Kazakstan, which shares the island with Uzbekistan, has warned.

Fears that bioterrorists could reach the anthrax and other potent battlefield germs buried on the island prompted the United States in October to announce a $6 million program to decontaminate the site.

U.S. officials say the anthrax is the same strain that killed dozens of people in 1979 in Sverdlovsk, a city in Russia’s Ural Mountains, when some of it accidentally leaked from a secret facility.

In 1988, fearing an imminent Western inspection, the Soviet military moved its stockpile of weapons-grade anthrax to Vozrozhdeniye. Troops buried it in 11 unmarked pits, using bleach to try to decontaminate it.

But the decontaminant did not penetrate some of the hard clumps, leaving anthrax spores that still survive and could be used as a seed culture to breed more.

A Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that despite repeated requests, Russia has never informed the now independent states of Kazakstan and Uzbekistan what biological agents are buried on their territory.

An American team discovered the live anthrax spores in 1995 – three years after the Soviet military abandoned the island, leaving it completely unguarded.

Terrorists aren’t the only worry. Animals could spread the germs tested on the island by migrating to the mainland.

“The mice and gerbils on the island could become the carriers of dangerous infections,” Gennady Lepyoshkin, a former bioweapons designer who heads Kazakstan’s National Biotechnologies Center, warned last spring.

Kines Ospanov, head of the especially dangerous infections department at Kazakstan’s national sanitary-epidemiological station, dismisses the purported dangers.

“The fact is that over the past 10 years hundreds of people have been on the island hunting for metals and nobody fell sick,” Ospanov said. “All the outcry is because people want to win grants and funds.”

The remark was apparently directed at Uzbekistan, which signed the October agreement with Washington on decontaminating the site, which is on the Uzbek-held part of the island.

U.S. officials say the project will include killing any live anthrax in the burial pits and the soil. Then the entire bioweapons lab complex will be razed.