Two More EU Letter Bombs Found

A letter bomb addressed to the head of the European Parliament's Christian Democrat group burst into flames on Monday without causing injury in the latest mail attack on European Union targets.

A second suspicious package addressed to a conservative member of the legislature was being investigated by bomb disposal experts at the EU's legislature.

The attack against German parliament member Hans-Gert Poettering was the fifth on EU institutions in the past two weeks.

A padded envelope caught fire when a member of Poettering's staff tried to open it early Monday. "Luckily she was not injured, but the envelope is destroyed," said a party spokeswoman Fiona Kearns.

Later Monday, a Belgian bomb-disposal squad was called to deal with a suspicious package in the offices of Jose Ignacio Salafranca, head of the Spanish conservatives in the EU parliament.

Parliament spokesman Andre Riche said a third suspicious package appeared to be false alarm.

Similar letters have been sent to European Commission President Romano Prodi, the head of the European Central Bank Jean-Claude Trichet and the offices of Europol and Eurojust in the Hague, the Netherlands.

Investigators suspect Italian anarchists are responsible for sending the earlier package bombs, all postmarked from Bologna, to prominent European offices or officials, said Luigi Persico of the Bologna police.

Police in Bologna ordered that postal officials working in the region watch out "above all for those packages that have a suspicious sender address, or a strange shape," said Persico.

No arrests have been made.

An Italian group calling itself the "Informal Anarchic Federation" took credit for setting two additional time bombs that exploded outside Prodi's house on Dec. 21, causing a small fire.

In a letter to left-leaning Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica on Dec. 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 "knows that the maneuvers have only begun to get close to him and others like him," the letter said.