Hatfill Described Rolling Mortuaries in 1998

Hatfill Described Rolling Mortuaries in 1998

NewsMax Staff
Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2002

In 1998, long before the anthrax letter attacks of last year, Dr. Steven Hatfill, the former army scientist named by John Ashcroft as a "person of interest" in those deadly acts of terror, outlined his notion of putting mobile mortuaries on railway cars to handle the thousands of bio-war deaths that would follow an attack on an American city, according to a report in the Village Voice.

Hatfill’s embalm-on-site concept was originally developed in South Africa and avoids mass graves - the specially equipped railcars processing 800 bodies an hour. In rapid fashion, the bodies would be embalmed, slipped into body bags, and stored for later burial when the flap is over.

Hatfill’s unveiled his grisly plan while participating in a 1998 George Washington University conference.

According to Hatfill’s vision, the mortuary cars would only be one element of a stable of 27 "disaster evacuation” trains, all poised and ready no more than five or six hours from every major city in the nation.

At the conference, Hatfill described his "disaster evacuation" trains as fashioned of linked shipping containers hauled on flatcars. In addition to containing large stores of antibiotics to treat the still living, various modules hauled by the trains would serve as command centers, intelligence sections, and vaccination stations.

Also strung out behind the engine would be Hatfill’s smooth riding and specially cushioned "intensive-care patient cars." The stricken would be raced from the biological ground zero and treated onboard.

The scientist also described to his audience so-called "cut out cars" that could be separated from the train to serve variously as field hospitals or command centers.

The Voice compared Hatfill's hospital train to the fabled "white train," supposedly feared by far-right patriots for years. The spectral trains are said to crisscross the country in the pursuit of unwary patriots.

"As the train races along the tracks, these prisoners are marched forward to a car right behind the engine, which contains a gas chamber. There, according to the lore, these defenders of democracy meet a ghastly end,” said the report.

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Bioterrorism

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