Bomb Blast Damages Athens Court Building

[IScreamSundays]

Source: NY Times

ATHENS — A powerful bomb detonated outside a court building near central Athens on Thursday morning, causing significant damage but no injuries, the police said.

The authorities found the device and cordoned off the area around the Athens administrative court after calls to the private television station Alter and the daily newspaper Eleftherotypia at about 7:40 a.m. warned that a bomb would go off there in 40 minutes.

“In both cases, the caller said the device had been strapped to a scooter outside the courthouse and gave the scooter’s registration number,” said an officer at the Athens police headquarters who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “The explosion occurred two minutes after the deadline,” the officer said, adding that police bomb disposal experts had gathered the remnants of the device and the vehicle and were examining them.

A local resident told the private television station Skai that he had seen two men dressed in police uniforms pull up near the court building on a motorcycle about 6:30 a.m. The witness said he greeted the men, who told him they were abandoning the scooter because it had engine problems. According to the witness, the pair then got into a white van parked nearby and were driven away by a third person.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/world/europe/31greece.html?partner=rss&emc=rss