Metro

‘Anthrax’ doctor hated New York

He just wanted to tell New York to go stick it.

The mad scientist believed to be behind the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks, which killed five people around the country and sickened several workers at The Post, put a coded message in his missives that spelled out his hatred for the city, a news federal report says.

As the FBI officially closed its investigation into the anthrax case yesterday, the feds said their prime suspect, Dr. Bruce Ivins — who killed himself in 2008 as the feds were about to charge him — thought the Big Apple was a rotten place and included the message “FNY” in his letters to New York media organizations.

“With respect to ‘FNY,’ according to numerous witnesses who knew him well . . . Dr. Ivins had a deep hatred for New York,” investigators wrote in a report released yesterday.

The report called the “FNY” message a “verbal assault on New York” and recalled an anecdote typical of Ivins’ disdain.

“In the aftermath of 9/11, Dr. Ivins sent [a former colleague] an e-mail where he essentially accused ‘typical’ New Yorkers of overplaying the tragedy and seeking attention, wondering ‘what about those folks in Oklahoma City, they deserve sympathy too,’ ” the report said.

Ivins also harbored a hatred for the Yankees.

“Dr. Ivins strongly associated [the former colleague] with New York,” the report said. “His communications with her . . . in the years that followed were replete with references to the New York Yankees, her favorite baseball team, not always in the kindest of terms.”

In the missives to The Post and former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, Ivins bolded some characters in the text. Investigators believe the sets of letters — “TTT AAT TAT” — correspond to the three-letter designations for three kinds of amino acid “codons” in DNA.

These acids also have single letter designations, that can spell out “FNY.” They can also spell out “PAT,” the name of a woman in his lab he had a crush on.