European police forces hunted on Tuesday for Italian anarchists suspected of waging a letter bomb campaign against top EU targets, as Germany sealed off a military hospital over a bomb threat by Islamic militants. The latest letter bomb was sent on Tuesday to Eurojust, a European Union body based in The Hague that is made up of prosecutors and judges who help member states investigate and prosecute serious cross-border crime cases. It did not explode. An Italian group calling itself the Informal Anarchist Federation had threatened a campaign against the "new European order" just days before the first device targeted EU President Romano Prodi on Saturday. No one has been injured by the four devices in four days that have also been sent to European Central Bank head Jean-Claude Trichet and Juergen Storbeck, head of the EU’s police agency Europol. An Italian judicial source said all the letter bombs had been posted from the country’s northern city of Bologna.
| At least they know where to start looking... |
Before the letter bombs, the Informal Anarchist Federation sent a statement to Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper claiming responsibility for planting small devices that exploded near Prodi’s home on December 22. Authorities said they were taking the group’s threat seriously. "We are looking at members of an Italian group that are close to the anarchist spectrum," said a spokesman for the German federal prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt. The letter bomb to Prodi exploded in his hands, but he was unhurt. The letters to Trichet and Storbeck were intercepted.
The EU’s headquarters in Brussels said it had tightened some security measures. |