 Britain's largest circulation tabloid newspaper, "The Sun", reported the discovery of a "factory of death", and other newspapers warned on their front pages "250,000 of us could have died", "Poison gang on the loose" and "Killer with no antidote".The fact that no ricin had been found was known to some government departments very early on, but this information was not revealed to the public until after Bourgass's trial two years later, although in the interim it was cited as evidence for further terrorism laws, as well as featuring in US Secretary of State Colin Powell's 5 February 2003 speech to the UN to build the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as part of the alleged Abu Musab al-Zarqawi global terrorist network.As late as February 2006, Chancellor Gordon Brown described it as a significant terrorism plot spanning 26 countries.