Car explosion near Italian synagogue not terror attack

Jerusalem Post ^ | Dec. 11, 2003 | ASSOCIATED PRESS

[yonif]

A car exploded outside a synagogue in the northern Italian city of Modena at 4 AM local time Thursday, killing the driver.

Army Radio reported that the Foreign Ministry said the incident was not a terror attack.

Police said the dead man was of Jordanian origin. The Italian news agency ANSA initially said he was of Palestinian origin, but then said he was born in Jordan and had Kuwaiti citizenship.

The prefect of Modena, Italia Fortunati, said all indications pointed to a "desperate" act by a man known to public-service agencies in Modena as having "serious problems," including alcohol abuse, financial and mental problems.

"He was suffering from depressive crisis, he was out of work," ANSA quoted Fortunati as saying. "I repeat, it's a gesture of a desperate man." Fortunati stressed that no explosives were found in the car.

Cinzia Ricciardi, a police official in Modena, said in a telephone interview that the man apparently set fire to a tank of flammable liquid inside the car, and that the flames then made the main gas tank explode. The gas in the main tank was of a particularly flammable type, she said. The blast, around 4:45 a.m. local time, blew out some nearby windows, including several in the synagogue, and caused minor damage to the roof of the building.

Two policemen guarding the synagogue had spotted the Peugeot in flames and attempted to extinguish the blaze, but moved away just before the car blew up.

The car was parked beside the wall which surrounds the synagogue and the blast blackened a portion of the wall.

There have been several recent anti-Semitic incidents, such as graffiti, in Italy, which has a Jewish community of some 30,000. But they have not been on the level of France, where schools and synagogues have been attacked in the past two years.

[BlackVeil]

He must have burnt himself alive. Shudder! He had mental problems, all right.

I suppose that we should all be glad that he didn't take some family members with him in his ghastly death. Those types often end up in murder/suicides.