Italy's Unabomber injures girl at Mass

[emad]

March 15, 2005

Times
From Richard Owen in Rome


AN ITALIAN minister called for the return of the death penalty yesterday after police blamed an explosion that injured a six-year-old girl in church on a “unabomber” who has terrorised northeastern Italy for more than a decade.

In the latest attack, an electric votive candle exploded in the hands of Greta Momesso just after Mass on Sunday at the town of Motta di Livenza near Treviso. Yesterday surgeons were reconstructing three of her fingers.

It was the 32nd attack in a 12-year campaign that has left a trail of injured people, many of them children. Police were investigating witness reports of a man aged 45 to 50 seen in the area before the explosion.

The Italian press has dubbed the attacker the “unabomber” after Ted Kaczynski, the American Unabomber arrested in 1996 after killing three people and injuring twenty-two by sending parcel bombs between 1978 and 1995. All the Italian attacks have taken place in the Veneto and Friuli regions, around Treviso and Pordenone.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-1525770,00.html