Letter Bomb

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BRUSSELS, Belgium — A letter bomb addressed to a senior German member of the European Parliament (search) burst into flames on Monday, but the latest in a string of mail attacks on European Union (search) targets again failed to cause injury.

A second suspicious package addressed to another member of the conservative group in the EU legislature was being investigated by bomb disposal experts.

The attack against German parliament member Hans-Gert Poettering (search) was the fifth on EU institutions in the past two weeks. Poettering is the head of the conservative European People's Party, the largest faction in the European Parliament.

A padded envelope caught fire when a member of Poettering's staff opened it early Monday.

"Luckily she was not injured," said a party spokeswoman Fiona Kearns.

The second suspect package was sent to Jose Ignacio Salafranca, head of the Spanish conservatives in the parliament.

Party officials said the letter sent to Poettering appeared to contain a book like the incendiary package sent to the Italian home of European Commission President Romano Prodi on Dec. 27 at the start of the bombing wave.

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

Investigators have zeroed in on an Italian anarchist group as the likely source of bombing wave. A group calling itself the "Informal Anarchic Federation" first took credit for setting two time bombs that exploded outside Prodi's house on Dec. 21, causing a small fire.

Besides Prodi, similar letters have also been sent to the head of the European Central Bank Jean-Claude Trichet, in Frankfurt, Germany, and the offices of Europol and Eurojust in the Hague, the Netherlands. None of the bombs have caused injury.

The woman who opened Poettering's letter did not notice if it was posted in Italy, like the other bombs, said Bob Fitzhenry, a spokesman for the European People's Party. The package was destroyed in the fire, he said.

Outside the Parliament's buildings, three firefighter trucks and bomb disposal squads were parked outside the legislature in central Brussels and plainclothes policemen were seen moving inside carrying metal boxes.

In a letter to left-leaning Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica on Dec. 23, the Italian anarchist 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 EU said it had stepped up security since the attacks.