Bruce Ivins, the main suspect in anthrax case sent himself an e-mail saying he new the identity of the man who sent the deadly anthrax mailings. The subject was “Finally! I know who mailed the anthrax!”

Bruce Ivins, 62, who authorities say killed himself in July as the Justice Department prepared to charge him in the anthrax case, is alleged to have sent the mail on Sept 7, 2007. But the e-mail message does not identify the attacker. In the message, Ivins says he plans on turning the information over to his lawyer who would then give it to authorities. The former biodefense researcher says he has to check a couple of things to be sure and then he can turn over the information and the final proof.

“I’m not looking forward to everybody getting dragged through the mud, but at least it will be over,’ the e-mail reads in an apparent reference to his colleagues at Ft. Detrick. “Finally! I should have it TOTALLY nailed down within the month. I should have been a private eye!!!!”

Officials from the FBI and the Justice Department have said that Ivins alone was responsible for the anthrax attacks. But the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said that the former scientist couldn’t have worked alone in the case of the anthrax letters. He said that he did not believe the FBI’s supposition that an Army scientist conducted the attacks alone.

Ivins worked at Army's biodefense lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland and committed suicide on July 29 by taking an acetaminophen overdose. Ivins had access to the anthrax strain in the letters and might have had reasons to send them to members of Congress and several people from the media.

On the other hand, skeptics say that the government researcher was singled out because he was the “weakest link.” Most of Ivins colleagues say that his behavior only became abnormal after being pursued relentlessly by FBI.

FBI investigators have said they traced a strain of anthrax from the envelopes that were sent to victims to a batch of anthrax in Ivin’s lab at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute in Fort Detrick, Maryland. And the case was thought to be over. Bruce Ivins’s colleagues allege that, armed with this evidence, the FBI began to pressure the people at the laboratory and singled out Ivins because he was most susceptible to being intimidated.

The anthrax attacks occurred less than a month after the September 11, 2001, suicide attacks that killed thousands of people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. The anthrax mailings that were sent to media organizations and politicians had killed five people – one of them was a postal worker in the mailroom of the New York Post –, shut down a Senate office building and spread fear of further terrorism. Seventeen people become ill but they recovered after treatment.

The Justice Department decided to keep the anthrax investigation officially open after it initially said the anthrax case had been solved. “We are working to close the investigation soon,” Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said.