Herald and Monitor receive mailings labeled anthrax

Packages appeared to be part of hoax

A police officer updated Boston Herald employees after they evacuated the building yesterday. (Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff)

Two major newspaper outlets in Boston received suspicious packages in the mail yesterday that law enforcement officials said appeared to be part of a widespread hoax carried out by a California man who is in federal custody.

Field tests for hazardous substances on the mailings received by the Boston Herald and The Christian Science Monitor came back negative, according to the FBI.

The Herald's building on Harrison Avenue was evacuated for about 45 minutes because of the incident. At the Monitor on Massachusetts Avenue, editor John Yemma said there was no evacuation.

Local investigators will forward the evidence from the two incidents to the FBI's Sacramento office to determine whether the Boston incidents are part of that office's case, said Gail Marcinkiewicz, Boston FBI spokeswoman.

Marc Keyser, 66, of Sacramento, is accused of sending packages to more than 100 major news media outlets across the country.

He was arrested Wednesday, but the FBI warned that more of the mailings could be received in the next few days.

Keyser was arrested after allegedly mailing packages containing a compact disc titled "Anthrax: Shock and Awe Terror" and a white sugar packet containing a powdery substance that was labeled, "Anthrax Sample," the FBI said.

The FBI said Keyser mailed the packages to media outlets, a congressional district office, and at least two restaurants in the Sacramento area.

At the Herald building yesterday afternoon, Superintendent Dan Linskey of the Boston police said the Herald mailing included a CD with the same title and a packet labeled as anthrax. He said Keyser's name was on the return address of the envelope.

Amanda Carswell, an editor's assistant at the Monitor, said in a telephone interview that she opened the envelope at her desk and immediately threw it to the floor after seeing the CD and the packet.

Carswell also said Keyser's name was on the envelope. She said she did an Internet search for his name and found that the mailing she had received fit the description of the hoax mailings.

Carswell said the envelope and its contents were put into the office's biohazard box and that the Monitor's security officials were looking into the matter.

"All of our mail and packages are screened; I don't know how it slipped through," Carswell said.

Keyser is being charged with three counts of sending hoax anthrax threats by mail. He had an initial appearance yesterday in federal court in California and was slated to appear again today for a detention hearing, said Special Agent Steve Dupre, a spokesman for the FBI office in Sacramento.

The investigation began after The Atlantic magazine in Washington received a letter Monday. By Wednesday, the FBI had received reports of 15 to 20 similar mailings received at various locations in the country, according to a sworn statement filed by an FBI agent in US District Court for the Eastern District of California. The Star Tribune of Minneapolis also received a mailing yesterday.

Keyser told agents in an interview Wednesday that he had written a book about the danger of an anthrax terrorist attack and put it on the CD, attached the sugar packets to the CD, and mailed them to more than 120 locations, Special Agent Filip Colfecu said in his affidavit.

"We don't want people to panic," Dupre said. "Just call us. We'll come out and pick them up."

Dupre said different media outlets had reacted differently, with some invoking a full emergency response while others simply threw the package away.

One radio station even thought the mailing came from the rock group Anthrax and tried to play the CD in their music player, he said.

Globe correspondent Anne Baker contributed to this report.