Authorities in Greece say that at least five foreign embassies in Athens were targeted in mail bomb attacks earlier this week. Two of the bombs went off seperately at the two seperate compounds where the Swiss and Russian embassies are located, with no reports of injuries.
Shortly after those explosions, an Athens courier became suspicious of a parcel he was carrying and alerted police on duty at the Greek Parliment building, where it was destroyed in a controlled demolition.
Two more parcel bombs surfaced- one at the Bulgarian embassy and the other at a shipping company in central Athens and were also destroyed by Greek police in controlled blasts.
One of the explosive parcels made it as far as the mail room of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin before it was intercepted and disarmed by German police.
The rash of bombings in Athens came the day after two Greek men in Athens carrying pistols and ammo in waist packs were arrested with a parcel bomb that was addressed to French President Nicolas Sarkozy and another addressed to the Belgian Embassy.
Police in Athens were responding after a parcel bomb exploded and burned a female employee of a delivery company on Monday when they noticed two suspicious men wearing baseball caps, wigs and sunglasses at a nearby bus stop. The men, aged 22 and 24, were taken into custody and are believed to be members of the Nuclei of Fire- a leftist-anarchist group reposnsible for a rash of arsons and setting off small bombs in Greece over the last two years.
Greece has suspended foreign mail shipments while authorities in the EU are undertaking an emergency review of security procedures for air cargo. The parcel bombs originating in Athens are thought to be unrelated to the recently unearthed Al Qaeda parcel bomb plot that originated in Yemen.
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