Investigators zeroed in on an Italian anarchist group as the likely source of four small bombs mailed to prominent European organizations in recent days.
At the same time, police sealed off streets around a military hospital in the city of Hamburg on Tuesday, acting on a tip from the US that al-Qaeda-linked extremists planned car bomb attacks against the facility.
The letter bombs have caused no injuries but revived memories of Europe before Sept. 11, 2001, when political radicals were more feared than Islamic militants.
The latest package was intercepted in The Hague on Tuesday at Eurojust, a European law enforcement group. Eurojust and nearby offices were evacuated while a bomb squad was called in to disarm the explosive. The mail room of the International Criminal Court, located in the same building, was also searched.
Two mail bombs were foiled on Monday: one addressed to the European Central Bank president in Frankfurt, Germany, and one to the director of Europol, a police agency based in The Hague.
On Saturday, EU Commission President Romano Prodi opened a package in Bologna, Italy, that burst into flames. He was unhurt.
No arrests were made, but Bologna police spokesman Luigi Persico said police suspect the same Italian anarchist group is responsible for all the attacks. He said Italian police were coordinating investigations with colleagues in other countries and working with police forces "from half of Europe."
An Italian group calling itself the Informal Anarchic Federation took credit for setting two additional time bombs that exploded outside Prodi's house on Dec. 21, causing a small fire.
In a letter to the left-leaning Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica on Dec. 23, the 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 attacks were carried out to make sure Prodi, a former Italian premier, "knows that the maneuvers have only begun to get close to him and others like him," the letter said.
Both the letter bomb sent to the European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet and a package bomb sent to Europol director Jurgen Storbeck on Monday were postmarked from Bologna.
In the terror threat on Tuesday against the German military hospital, a US intelligence agency passed on information pointing to Ansar al-Islam, a group based in northern Iraq suspected of recruiting in Europe for suicide missions in Iraq, said Hamburg's top security official, Dirk Nockemann.
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