Posted by Sandy Donchess on October 28, 1999 at 10:56:19:
Scientists get booby-trapped letters
Razor blades, and deadline, sent by animal rights extremists
MSNBC News Services
Oct. 28 — Police on Thursday were investigating a group calling itself the "Justice Department" after scientists doing research with primates were sent letters booby-trapped with razor blades. The letters, which told the scientists they had until next fall to release all primates, is just the latest strategy by extremists suspected in at least 100 terrorist acts in the last two decades.
THE SCIENTISTS who received the booby-trapped letters included six from Harvard University and several at Emory University.
A communique posted on a Web site sympathetic to the “Justice Department” contained a list of about 80 researchers scattered across the country who do work with primates, police said.
Others on the list include scientists at the University of California, the University of Washington and Tulane University in New Orleans.
The list was forwarded over the weekend by a group that monitors such extremists, giving police and researchers some advance notice.
The six Harvard scientists who received the letters Tuesday turned them over to campus police. Only one opened his letter, and he was not cut by the blade inside.
“You have been targeted and you have until autumn of 2000 to release all your primate captives and get out of the vivisection industry,” one letter said.
SECOND MASS MAILING
The letters, postmarked Friday in Las Vegas, were the second such mass mailing in the past 90 days.
'It’s very sobering to realize that it would be very easy for an individual to do bodily harm if they were determined.'
Don Wolf
An Oregon researcher who got a booby-trapped letter
In early August, the group mailed similar envelopes to fur industry officials across the United States and Canada. Animal-rights extremists have been accused of previous mailings in England and Canada, but the latest mass mailings are thought to be unprecedented in the United States.
For 20 years, underground terrorists devoted to the environment and its creatures have burned, bombed and otherwise sabotaged industries that rely on natural resources.
An investigation by the Oregonian, a Portland newspaper, found that at least 100 major acts of such violence have occurred in the U.S. West since 1980, causing $43 million in damages. Only a quarter of those cases have been solved.
The violence has typically intended to inflict economic, not physical, harm.
But the mass-mailed letters, rigged with utility razor blades affixed to index cards, were designed to cut fingers. The wife of a Pennsylvania fur farmer, who sliced her thumb last summer, appears to be the only one hurt so far.
'ONLY THE BEGINNING'
The latest batch of letters was sent to 86 primate researchers across the country, according to a notice posted by the extremist organization on an Animal Liberation Front Internet site.
“Animal abusers beware,” the site warns. “The wave of booby-trapped letters sent to fur farmers in North America in August was only the beginning.”
Don Wolf, a senior scientist at Oregon Health Sciences University’s regional primate research center in Hillsboro, received one of the booby-trapped letters early Monday at a Portland fertility clinic. Wolf had been warned that he was on the hit list, so he didn’t open the letter when it arrived. Instead, he gave the envelope to campus police, who turned it over to the FBI.
“It’s very sobering to realize that it would be very easy for an individual to do bodily harm if they were determined,” Wolf said.
Jacquie Calnan, president of Americans for Medical Progress, a group dedicated to bolstering public opinion of medical research, was dismayed by the mailings. “They feel it’s time for scientists to get hurt,” she said.
And Teresa Platt, who heads a fur industry group, said that “these attacks are designed to render you silent.” Platt, burned in effigy by animal-rights activists last month in California, has received e-mailed death threats and, in August, got one of the “Justice Department’s” first mass-mailed razor blade letters.
MORE EXTREME EXTREMISTS
The “Justice Department,” said to have originated in England as an underground offshoot of that nation’s animal-rights movement, appears to be “dissatisfied with the progress of animal liberation, so they feel that violence against humans is justified,” said David Barbarash, spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Even the most extreme animal-rights activists differ on whether booby-trapped letters are an appropriate tactic.
“I’m truthfully not opposed to it, but, at the same time, it’s not something I’m going to run out and do,” said Craig Rosebraugh, a Portland, Ore., activist who is also a national spokesman for the secretive Earth Liberation Front. “I don’t condemn it in any way.”
Barbarash does.
“It’s an intimidation tactic to force animal abusers out of business, and it may be successful — I guess we’ll have to find out — but it makes me uncomfortable,” he said. “I don’t like violence.”
Even though he condemns the tactic, Barbarash stands accused of acting on behalf of the “Justice Department” by mailing similar booby-trapped letters to 22 hunting guides in Canada in early 1996. Barbarash denies the charge, saying it is an attempt by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to destroy him.