SECURITY at Barclay's banks will be stepped up this week after a bomb attack at one of its branches in Britain.
Detectives are still not sure if Saturday's attack, involving a home made device which caused a small explosion near cash machines at Ealing Broadway, west London, was caused by the bomber.
They say the blast, which slightly injured three people, was unlikely to be the work of the IRA.
The Mardi Gra campaign goes back to December 1994, when the first of 25 bombs and booby trapped devices were sent. During the subsequent 18 months, three bombs have gone off, and one person an employee in a north London branch has been injured.
The devices have mostly been crude and disguised in the form of a book or a videocassette, police say. Investigators initially thought the group were merely blackmailers, as an early message demanded bank cards that would enable the perpetrators to withdraw large sums of money from cash machines. But the focus has since switched to somebody who might have a grudge against Barclay's, possibly a former employee or a peeved client.
Barclay's, Britain's largest banking group, is currently cutting back on staff, having made 18,500 people redundant out of an overall staff of 66,000 in the past five years.
"Mardi Gra is the code name of a small group of Barclay's Bank victims who are in the process of reversing the tide of fortune into their favour," the group wrote to the Daily Mail a week ago.