WASHINGTON — A panel of psychiatrists who studied the medical records of Bruce Ivins said Wednesday the FBI’s case that he mailed the anthrax letters in 2001 was persuasive, and that Ivins’ history of mental problems should have disqualified him from working with dangerous pathogens.

Since there will be no trial for Ivins, who killed himself in 2008 as prosecutors prepared to charge him, the panel’s review of all the FBI’s investigative documents may be the closest substitute.

“Dr. Ivins was psychologically disposed to undertake the mailings; his behavioral history demonstrated his potential for carrying them out; and he had the motivation and the means,” the panel wrote in its 285-page report, released at a news conference Wednesday. The review was authorized in a confidential 2009 order by Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court in Washington that had not been previously revealed.

The report adds new detail to the FBI’s account of Ivins’ eccentric and sometimes criminal secret life, including his obsession with a sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, and break-ins at some of its chapter offices. It documents his preoccupation with several women, including his two laboratory technicians, his stalking behavior and his penchant for long night drives to mail or drop off packages, often under assumed names.

“A man like him, who had committed repeated acts of breaking and entering as well as burglary without having been caught, would have little difficulty mailing the letters late at night or early in the morning without being seen,” the panel wrote.

It also found that Ivins, who was 62 when he died, was “homicidal” in the last weeks of his life. Only his involuntary commitment for psychiatric treatment, the panel wrote, “prevented a mass shooting and fulfillment of his promise to go out in a ‘blaze of glory,’” the report said.

Some colleagues of Ivins at the Army’s biodefense center at Fort Detrick, Md., have defended his innocence.

Gregory Saathoff, a University of Virginia psychiatrist and the panel’s chairman, acknowledged that “people very, very close to him believe in his innocence.” But he said that was a result of Ivins’ success in hiding his obsessions from family and friends.

“The panel was quite struck by Ivins’ ability to lead a parallel life,” Saathoff said.

Saathoff is a longtime FBI consultant who was asked after Ivins’ suicide to review his psychiatric records. He then proposed convening the panel, which was approved by Lamberth.

Saathoff said the FBI had provided the case files and paid $38,000 in expenses for the nine panel members, who volunteered their time. But he said neither the bureau nor any other government agency had reviewed or altered the report before it was completed. The public text was redacted to protect the privacy of health professionals, investigators and, Ivins himself, he said.

“To most of his colleagues and acquaintances, Dr. Ivins was an eccentric, socially awkward, harmless figure, an esteemed bacteriologist who juggled at parties, played the keyboard at church and wrote clever poems for departing colleagues,” the report said. “That is precisely how Dr. Ivins wanted them to see him. He cultivated a persona of benign eccentricity that masked his obsessions and criminal thoughts.”

The report describes Ivins’ “strange and traumatic childhood,” during which his mother “assaulted and abused her husband — stabbing him, beating him, and threatening to kill him.”

As early as 1978, Ivins sought treatment for psychiatric problems that should have prevented him from obtaining the “secret” clearance necessary to go to work in 1980 at the Army’s biodefense center, the report said. When the anthrax attacks occurred, the psychiatrist who treated him then — and who had not seen him for two decades — immediately wondered if Ivins might be behind them, the report said.

Though he attracted investigators’ suspicions as early as 2004, the FBI never questioned his current or former mental health providers until his involuntary hospitalization in July 2008, the report said.

The panel found that Ivins carried out the attacks to get “revenge” against an array of imagined enemies, including the news media, as well as “to elevate his own significance” and rescue his research on anthrax vaccines.

The anthrax letters, mailed to news organizations and two U.S. senators in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, killed five people and sickened at least 17 others. Contamination shut down much of the postal system, drove members of Congress and Supreme Court justices from their offices and touched off a national panic.

The FBI’s investigation focused for months on another former Fort Detrick scientist, Steven Hatfill, who later sued the Justice Department and the FBI for leaking confidential information about him and received a settlement worth $4.6 million in June 2008. One month later came Ivins’ suicide, by an overdose of Tylenol.