Posted on 12/30/2003 4:30:52 PM PST by Indy Pendance
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - 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.
BOMBING CLAIM
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.
The letter bomb campaign occurred at a time of security jitters around the world in the wake of a warning by the United States of an increased threat of terror attacks over the Christmas and New Year festive season.
In Hamburg, German police and soldiers sealed off a military hospital after receiving information Islamic militants planned a car bomb attack on the building.
"We have firm indications pointing to individuals planning an attack on the hospital with a car bomb," a police spokesman said, adding the suspects were believed to come from the "Islamic terrorist scene."
Police sources said security services had information pointing to two Islamic militants with connections to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
A Hamburg official said the suspects were linked to the Ansar al-Islam group, which Washington says is active in fighting its troops in Iraq.
Italian authorities said the skies over Rome would be off limits over the New Year holiday to all aircraft except commercial and military flights.
It mirrored a decision by the United States on Tuesday to keep certain aircraft out of the sky over New Year's Eve revellers in New York and other major cities.
In Amsterdam, hundreds of airline passengers were evacuated from two departure halls at Schiphol international airport after a bomb squad was called in to check an abandoned suitcase. It turned out to be false alarm.
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