Security tightened after letter bomb attacks

European security forces are tightening protection for leading European Union officials following the discovery of four bombs mailed to EU agencies.

“Our security services have stepped up their action and co-ordination to ensure the safety of all institutions and their leaders,” Javier Solana, the EU’s head of foreign and security policy, said in Brussels.

Solana condemned the attacks and expressed “deep solidarity with all those that have been targeted”.

European Commission President Romano Prodi escaped injury on Saturday when opening a package that burst into flames at his home in Bologna Italy.

Since then, bombs have been found mailed to the president of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, and to two EU crime-fighting agencies based in the Netherlands.

Investigators believe Italian anarchists were behind the bombs and inquiries centred on Bologna.

The letter bombs caused no injuries but revived memories of Europe before September 11, when political radicals were more feared than Islamic militants.

The latest package was intercepted in The Hague yesterday at Eurojust, a European law enforcement group. Eurojust and nearby offices were evacuated while a bomb squad was called in to disarm the explosive. The postroom of the International Criminal Court, in the same building, was also searched.

Two mail bombs were foiled on Monday – one addressed to the European Central Bank president in Frankfurt and one to the director of Europol, a police intelligence agency based in The Hague.

No arrests were made, but Bologna police spokesman Luigi Persico said police suspected the same Italian anarchist group was responsible for all the attacks. He said Italian police were co-ordinating investigations with colleagues in other countries and working with police forces “from half of Europe”.

An Italian group calling itself the Informal Anarchic Federation said it set two additional time bombs that exploded outside Prodi’s house on December 21, causing a small fire.

In a letter to left-leaning Italian daily newspaper La Republica on December 23, the group said it had planted the bombs to “hit at the apparatus of control that is repressive and leading the democratic show that is the new European order”.

The attacks were carried out to make sure Prodi, a former Italian premier, “knows that the manoeuvres have only begun to get close to him and others like him”.

Both the letter bomb sent to the European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet and a package bomb sent to Europol director Jurgen Storbeck on Monday were postmarked from Bologna.

Meanwhile German police sealed off streets around a German military hospital in Hamburg yesterday, acting on a tip from the United States that al Qaida-linked extremists planned car bomb attacks against the building.

An American intelligence agency passed on information pointing to Ansar al-Islam, a group based in northern Iraq suspected of recruiting in Europe for suicide missions in Iraq, said Hamburg’s top security official, Dirk Nockemann.

Hamburg was home to an al Qaida cell that included three of the September 11, 2001, suicide pilots, and police there said state officials evaluated yesterday’s threat as “very serious”.

Police swarmed the area around the hospital. At the nearby Wandsbek-Gartenstadt subway station, officers with submachine-guns and bullet-proof vests checked the identity cards of residents.