Chief terror supect Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network have been planning to manufacture a lethal biological poison, a British daily said on Friday after finding documents in a Taliban safe-house in Afghanistan`s capital. Instructions for making the poison ricin were concealed amid a mass of scattered documents listing formulae for manufacturing explosives, fuses and detonation circuits, the Times newpaper said.
The documents were discovered at a gated house in Kabul, where two Arab doctors who worked there were beaten and killed as they tried to escape on Monday night, it said.
The poison, which was used by Bulgarian secret police to kill the exile Georgi Markov as he walked across Waterloo Bridge, London, in 1978, is produced from a toxic protein in castor oil seed.
One page of the instructions reads: "A certain amount, equal to a strong dose, will be able to kill an adult, and a dose equal to seven seeds will kill a child." Another page says: "Gloves and face mask are essential for the preparation of ricin. Period of death varies from 3-5 days minimum, 4-14 days maximum."
Ricin, one of the most toxic biological agents, was discovered by UN weapons inspectors in Iraq as part of dictator Saddam Hussein`s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s, the newspaper said. Bureau Report