New York: Three foreign missions in New York have received letters with white powder, prompting the decontamination of employees as authorities investigated the nature of the substance, police said on Tuesday.
The letters were received by the missions of Uzbekistan, Austria and France yesterday between 4:01 and 6:31 pm local time, said detective John Sweeney.
"Three letters were sent with white powder but they don`t know what the powder is yet," Sweeney said.
Authorities were testing the white powder to determine what it was, and at least one test came back negative, he said.
But in the meantime about 40 people at all three missions were decontaminated as a precaution, including 33 from the French mission, he said.
In 2001, letters containing anthrax killed five people in the United States and spread panic.
Since then, police and fire officers have been called out on thousands of occasions to investigate suspicious mailings, most of them harmless.
Bureau Report
