US forces stepped up their uncompromising assault on Afghanistan's Taliban regime today while officials in Pakistan and Germany announced positive tests for anthrax-by-mail attacks.
There were no reports that anyone had been infected by the disease, but health officials in the two countries said laboratory tests suggested the deadly spores had been posted to a range of public and private offices.
In Pakistan, where a government minister confirmed that three cases had been recorded, the revelations cranked up tensions on a day when security services were already on alert to head off unrest at anti-American protests.
Meanwhile, US forces dismissed speculation they were planning a pause in their attacks in two weeks' time to mark the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and unleashed their third day of carpet bombing on Taliban frontlines.
Security forces were also on high alert in the United States, where the governor of California said a "credible threat" of attacks had been made against San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge and three other landmark spans.
Attur Rehman, Pakistan's minister for science and technology, told AFPanthrax had been found at a bank, a computer firm and a newspaper but no one had contracted the disease.
"These cases have been confirmed but fortunately nobody has been infected," he said.
Mahmood Sham the editor of Jang, Pakistan's biggest-selling daily, said an anthrax-laced letter had been hand-delivered to his the Urdu-language paper's main Karachi office.
"Last week we received this letter and we sent it to the hospital for tests and on Thursday the report confirmed it contained anthrax," he said, adding that many of his staff had been put on antibiotics as a precaution.
The government Press Information Department (PID) said, however, that the letter may prove to have been a hoax.
Anthrax spores were also found by intital tests on letters posted to two addresses in Germany officials said.
A spokesman for the health ministry in the eastern state of Thuringia said an "urgent suspicion" of a germs-by-mail attack had been raised by two initial tests on a supect package received there.
The German news agency DPAreported that the letter had been sent to the Labour Office in the city of Rudolstadt-Volkstedt from somewhere in Germany, but that the return address was in the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
Authorities in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein were investigating a "firm suspicion" of anthrax, a government spokesman in Kiel said.
AFP