Coffee-pot bomb hits Italian centre in Barcelona

MADRID - A metal coffee pot packed with explosives blew up in the doorway of the Italian Culture Institute in Barcelona yesterday, slightly wounding a policeman, police said.

Although no one claimed responsibility, police were examining recent explosions by anarchists using similar devices for clues, the top representative of the Madrid government in the Catalan region said.

"In Barcelona, there have been some protests from support groups of prisoners of the same ideology in Italy," Joan Rangel told local radio.

However, police in the northeastern Spanish port said they could not confirm anarchists were behind the and were keeping an open mind in their investigations.

"The police were warned of a suspicious looking coffee-maker in the doorway of the Italian Institute in Barcelona ... when police were investigating the device, it exploded, injuring the policeman and killing a sniffer dog," a police spokesman in Madrid said.

Italian anarchists claimed responsibility earlier this year for wave of letter bombs that exploded outside police stations in northern Italy.

Italy has been plagued in recent years by a series of small-scale bomb attacks blamed on shadowy anarchist groups bent on undermining the country's democratic system.

Italian police carried out more than 100 raids in May and said they had uncovered a "vast and dangerous" anarchist network which had orchestrated the bombing campaign.

Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu has compared the anarchist movement to Italy's Red Brigades, a 1970s Marxist guerrilla group that orchestrated bombings and kidnappings.

- REUTERS