"It is now time for the United States of America to own up to its responsibility to my family and to right this wrong that resulted in the loss of my beloved husband and my children's beloved father," Maureen Stevens said in a press conference at her office here, according to BBC News.
Stevens sued the government in 2003 claiming that lax security at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases in Frederick, MD, the source of the anthrax spores, caused the death of her husband Robert, 63.
Robert Stevens was a tabloid photo editor at American Media Inc.'s offices in Boca Raton when he inhaled the deadly spores from a letter he received in October 2001 and contracted pulmonary anthrax that killed him.
FBI agents have learned that Army bioscientist Bruce Ivins, who worked at the Maryland lab, secretly planted anthrax in mail and sent it to a number of people and institutions in an attempt to test an anti-anthrax vaccine he made. Four other people died among 17 people infected by the contaminated letters while 35,000 others believed exposed to anthrax had to take antibiotics as precaution.
Prosecutors were to charge Ivins last week but the scientist, described as mentally unstable, committed suicide before he was arrested.
