employee s hands. it actually went off after that employee tossed that envelope into a bin, and according to jeanne meserve, there are similar circumstances. does that mean that the envelope looked alike or it had a similar sort of fiery flare and sulfuric smell? don t know. jeanne is working on that. i want to bring back in, mike brooks, your backyard, washington, d.c. talking about what investigators will glean from the evidence from one of these envelopes. what they ll do is, take this take the evidence from yesterday and from today. send it down to the fbi lab in quantico, the explosives lab. explosives examiners will take a look at this. as we talked about, they ll be looking for hairs and fibers, and one of the last places they send this is for fingerprint evidence. they sent it late because that usually make as mess of the evidence because of the different dyes and things they use to try to lift any prints off of that. one of the other things, too. keep in mind, most governm
yesterday at this time the story was breaking in maryland. the hunt for whenever mailed those packages that caught fire when they were opened, two different maryland office buildings. we have cnn homeland security correspondent jeanne meserve. she s been following every single development. jeanne, you ve got new information. what do you know today? there s very active investigation going on. they describe these packages. they said they were white boxes, about 7 1/2 inches by 4 inches by 1 inch, described by the superintendent of the state police as a looking like the sort of box you might find a vhs tape in. but in addition they showed us the notes. maybe we can take that picture full screen. on that note, report of suspicious activity. total bull expletive. you have created a
tell me who you see and have you seen evacuations? sure, brooke. we re seeing a lot of police, fire, emergency, medical assistance, a lot of apparatuses here. the fbi and atf are on their ways. jeanne meserve reported. where we are, a fairly industrial and mixed use residential area. the scene i m shooting is at a budweiser distributesing plant. those two locations have not been evacuated where we are. that distribution, beer distributor, and the bank have not been evacuated and it looks like the building to the left of our shot has not been evacuated either. as we get probably a block and a half away right knew from that post office facility and it s tough to see. we haven t seen a lot of folks streaming out of there. things you typically see in an evacuation like that but we are seeing tons and tons of emergency personnel and police and fire right now.
here on out? actually they have a lot of evidence to work with. because these things didn t totally destruct, there s potential for a lot of forensic information to be gleaned from this. they haven t told us how the devices worked, what their component was, they ll try to figure out how they were assembled. where they were bought. these things had addresses on them, what appeared to be bogus, return addresses. one of them had stamps on them. there could be dna or something like that there. they ve been taken down to tbi lab in quantico for a closer look. in addition the postal service investigators are trying to figure out where it was mail and what route it took to the state of maryland. there s still a lot to be done by they do have a fair amount of material to work with. that s a great thing. jeanne meserve out of washington. jeanne, thank you. you bet. millions of people in sudan expected to walk to the polls next week, actually sunday, to vote on inpen deps, but there
hands. the person tossed it into a sorting bin and then smelled smoke. huh. reporter: that s what we re reading. i see you reading on the blackberry. just getting this information in. appreciate you passing that along. unlike in annapolis where the two employee was opening the envelope. in this situation according to your source it was not opened did not go off in this individual s hand, was tossed into a bin and that is when they smelled smoke, did you jay. reporter: smelled smoke is how this source puts it. yesterday we were hearing with those devices in maryland there was a smell of sulfur, nothing that specific here in this information we have so far, but we re in the early going here. we are indeed. jeanne meserve. i thank you. we also have jim cavanaugh on the line, retired atf. let s talk after the break. let s get a break in. you re watching breaking news unfold right here on cnn. be right back. ordinary rubs don t always work on my arthritis.