The Hindu : Ricin found at Paris railway station

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Mar 22, 2003

International

International

Ricin found at Paris railway station

By Vaiju Naravane

Paris March 21. Police in France discovered two vials of the deadly poison ricin in a locker at Paris' Gare de Lyon train station. The vials were found during scheduled searches of luggage lockers at railway stations under the reinforced anti-terrorist plan known as vigipirate.

The locker contained "two vials with a powder, a bottle filled with a liquid and two smaller bottles also containing a liquid,'' the French Interior Ministry said in a statement. It said the incident was related to the arrest of Islamic militants in Paris last October.

Ricin is one of the world's deadliest naturally-occurring poisons and is extracted from castor beans. This is the first time it has been found on French soil. The substance has been used for biological weapons. Ricin kills a cell by shutting down its protein synthesis, something that is achieved if just a single ricin molecule penetrates the cell wall.

British police seized small quantities of the substance in a raid in north London in January, leading to the arrest of five Algerian men. Police in France also suspect a terrorist link. The fact that the poison was found stashed away in a locker at the Gare de Lyon is of significance. The station is where trains from the south of France terminate in Paris. In the past several terrorist cells were linked to highly motivated Islamic militant movements in the southern French cities of Lyon and Marseilles.

Ricin is said to be 6,000 times more powerful than cyanide. A speck weighing only 70 micrograms (two millionths of an ounce) — something no bigger than a grain of salt — is enough to kill an adult. In January, a U.S. government source said the Central Intelligence Agency was investigating the possibility that a top weapons expert from Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network may have been involved in a suspected plot to use ricin to poison food for British troops.

It came to prominence in 1978, when a Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, was killed by secret agents in London who used a toxin-laced pellet fired from an umbrella tip as he was waiting for a bus.

It can be absorbed into the bloodstream through inhalation, ingestion, injection and even through skin contact. Military interest in the toxin dates back to at least World War I.

The initial symptoms of ricin poisoning are rather like flu. Fever, coughing and an upset stomach develop about a day after exposure to the poison. The lungs, liver, kidneys and immune system progressively fail, leading to death within three to five days.

Ricin is easier to make than anthrax and the notorious poison botulinum — castor bean plants can be easily grown, the equipment can be bought off the shelf and the skills to extract the poison are available to a chemistry graduate.

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