Hotel find is cyanide, police confirm
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Denver police confirmed that a granular substance found inside an upscale Denver hotel room is sodium cyanide.
A Canadian national was found dead Monday in room 408 of the Burnsley Hotel.
The Denver Coroner's Office has not completed the autopsy of 29-year-old Saleman Abdirahman Dirie. Denver police spokesman John White said Dirie's death appears to be an isolated incident and is not related to the Democratic National Convention.
White said no foul play is suspected.
The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force is assisting Denver police with the investigation.
"You have a suspicious substance that was found in a hotel room in conjunction with person being a foreign national, and we have a lot of questions and that is why we are assisting," said Denver FBI spokeswoman Kathy Wright.
Authorities are trying to determine why Dirie was in Denver and how and when he got into the United States.
"There is not necessarily more of a concern, but it is something we are aware of and how close the DNC is," Wright said. "We want to make sure we do everything we can to find out the unknown."
Denver police said Dirie had apparently been dead for several days when his body was found in a suite in the hotel at 10th and Grant on Monday morning.
After the coroner's office said cyanide might be a factor, investigators returned a few hours later and found the substance.
For a short time, streets were blocked off around the hotel until the hazardous-material risk was assessed.
No hotel guests nor employees became ill, and the contamination has not been found elsewhere in the hotel, Denver police said Monday.
Jason Ford, general manager of the 17-story Burnsley hotel, said Tuesday that he had no comment on Dirie or how long he had stayed at the hotel.
"We always respect the privacy of all our guests," he said.
A public-records search of the last name "Dirie" in Ottawa turned up a half dozen names; a database search in the Denver area found four.
Calls to people thought to be Dirie's relatives in Ottawa were not immediately returned.
The Ottawa Sun newspaper reported that Dirie was a member of the city's Somali community and interviewed manager Addirizuk Karod, manager of the Somali Centre for Family Services, who recalled Dirie coming to the center with friends.
He told the paper that the Dirie family came to Ottawa as refugees years earlier but had attained Canadian citizenship. Dirie's father traveled to Denver when he learned of his son's death, Karod said.
"Dirie" is not an uncommon name, but "Abdirahman" is very common in some African countries: A Nexis search of African and Middle Eastern newspapers produced more than 3,000 hits.
A Google search of "Abdirahman Dirie" — excluding news stories about the man found in the Burnsley — found two postings.
One was a poem attributed to an author by that name titled "Love." The other was a blog comment posted July 11 under the heading "Somali Christian Blog Abandoned" attributed to a "Abdirahman Dirie" that read: "Please don't talk s---, that man deserves what happened to him, simply because having the Bible in one hand, and a bread in the other hand, is not a correct thing! Kill Them, Kill them, Kill them, that is my massage!" (sic)
No database or Internet record could be found for a "Saleman Abdirahman Dirie."
Alison Zawada, Consul at the Canadian Consulate in Denver, said her office isn't aware of why Dirie came to Denver, how he got here or how long he was planning to stay.
Zawada said Canadian citizens can cross the border, by car or on foot, without a passport.
"You just have to show an ID if you travel by land," she said.
Relatives of Dirie's who have come to Denver because of the death have declined, through the consulate, to talk with the press, Zawada said.
The consulate is not trying to retrace Dirie's steps here, Zawada said, and it will leave the investigation to local authorities.
"Our role is to provide assistance to Canadians," she said.
Cyanide is a fast-acting poison that prevents the cells from using oxygen, causing a fast die-off of cells in the heart, brain and other organs, according to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Possessing sodium cyanide is not illegal because it is used in mining to extract gold and for other industrial purposes.
Denver fire officials say they made sure that the substance had not spilled and that all the readings in the hotel were negative.
"There was nothing in the room, but as a precaution, we advised the hotel to call an environmental-cleanup company," said Fire Department spokesman Lt. Phil Champagne.
Denver Post research librarian Barry Osborne and staff writer Kieran Nicholson contributed to this report.
7:31 PM 8/13/2008
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