Canwest News Service
Andrew Duffy
Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, 29, a member of Ottawa's Somali community, had been dead for several days when his body was discovered Monday in a fourth-floor room of the Burnsley Hotel in downtown Denver.

Near Dirie's body was a container with a white powdery substance.

Denver police spokesman John White said Wednesday tests have confirmed that the substance is sodium cyanide, a potentially dangerous chemical.

"Sodium cyanide is readily available commercially: it's found in rat poison; it's used to plate metals like gold-plated watches and gold-plated rings," White explained.

Police are still waiting for a coroner's report to tell them whether Dirie died from exposure to the chemical.

It's not clear, he said, why the man was in possession of sodium cyanide or what he intended to do with it.

The event has raised fear levels among already jittery security officials just days before the Democratic National Convention, which is to open in Denver on Aug. 25. The convention is to officially nominate Illinois Senator Barack Obama as the party's presidential candidate.

In a 2006 article published in the Journal of Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, Dr. Mark Keim, of the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that "the characteristics of cyanide are those of the ideal terrorist weapon."

"Cyanide has a long history of use as a murder weapon, terrorist weapon and weapon of war, as well as an agent of suicide and attempted genocide," he wrote.

An estimated 1.84 billion pounds (834 million kilograms) of hydrogen cyanide produced each year for use in industrial processes.

Source: Canwest News Service, Aug 13, 2008