Florida DEA Office Gutted by Firebomb : Crime: Past drug indictments are being reviewed in a search for suspects. Authorities say the ‘act of desperation’ will not be a setback.

A federal Drug Enforcement Administration office in Ft. Myers, Fla., was destroyed by a firebomb Saturday, and authorities said they were studying recent drug-related indictments in an effort to identify suspects.

Frank Shultz, a spokesman at DEA headquarters in Washington, said a pipe bomb was thrown through a window of the Ft. Myers field office shortly after 2 a.m., gutting the one-story structure. No one was injured.

The bombing marked the first time a DEA facility has been attacked since the federal government stepped up its war on drugs.

A car bombing was reported three hours earlier in a residential area 10 miles from the DEA office, according to Sheri Peterson of the Lee County Sheriff’s Department.

Authorities did not know if the two incidents were related, but a DEA official said the first blast could have been “a diversion.”

Thomas V. Cash, special agent in charge of the Miami DEA office, flew to Ft. Myers to inspect the bombed-out office, located in a shopping mall in the resort community northwest of Miami on the Gulf Coast. The agency was the only tenant in the building. Damage was estimated at $4 million.

A special team of FBI explosives experts from Washington was sent to the scene along with technicians from the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, according to Allen McCreight, head of the FBI field office in Tampa, Fla..

John Fernandez, a DEA official in Miami, said agents were examining a number of possibilities in an effort to determine who carried out the bombing.

ABC News reported that a man indicted last week in a drug case had threatened to destroy the office.

“It could be one of many individuals,” Fernandez said, noting that the Ft. Myers office has developed numerous drug cases.

“If you look at the productivity of this office, we’ve been knocking them dead lately,” he said.

A drug-related indictment was returned Thursday in Ft. Myers, and two of the four defendants are still at large. But federal officials cautioned that they were not yet linking that case to the bombing.

DEA agents planned to issue a nationwide alert for suspects and were showing mug shots from the drug conspiracy case, NBC News reported.

“This is an act of desperation,” Fernandez said. “It they think this is a setback for us, it’s not. This shows we’re on the right track.”

Fernandez speculated that the perpetrators might have believed they could destroy important DEA evidence or paper work through the bombing.

“But a lot of what you think we would lose, we have duplicate copies of,” Fernandez said. “We also have a lot of information in computer banks.”