ITALY: Police defused a bomb yesterday in a Sardinian coastal town close to where Tony Blair had been staying with the Italian prime minister just hours earlier.
Bomb-disposal experts found and defused the device, which contained dynamite, a fuse and a timer, in Porto Rotondo in the early hours of yesterday morning.
Mr Blair and his wife, Cherie, left Sardinia yesterday evening after spending two days at Silvio Berlusconi's luxury Villa Certosa.
The bomb was discovered after a local newspaper received a telephone warning at around 10.45 p.m. last night from an extreme communist group.
The caller, who claimed to be from the Proletarian Groups for Communism, said the organisation had planted two bombs, but only gave the location of one of them.
According to Italian daily Corriere della Sera, the caller said: "The other one - we're not telling you, go and find it. It's for Berlusconi." A spokesman for Sardinian police said just one bomb had been found and defused by carabinieri in an area about six kilometres from Mr Berlusconi's villa.
The group believed to be responsible for planting the device was a Sardinian communist group and there was no link to Islamic extremists, he added.
A group linked to al-Qaeda threatened Italy last week over its role in Iraq and leftist groups in the country have also been fiercely opposed to the conflict.
Patrizia Mozzi, a journalist from the newspaper that received the warning, said the caller told her: "We promised a summer of fire and this is the response to Berlusconi. War against war."
A Downing Street spokesman said: "It is a matter for the Italian authorities and it is our practice not to comment on security matters."
Security for Mr Blair's visit to Italy had been exceptionally tight in the wake of recent threats to the country, details of which emerged earlier this week.
Just a day before Mr and Mrs Blair arrived in Sardinia, a statement appeared on an Islamic website that warned the Italian government it had "dug its grave by its own hands" after it ignored a warning to withdraw its troops from Iraq.
The statement, signed by the Abu-Hafs al-Masri Brigades, declared a "bloody war" and said "the earth will be shaken under the feet of any Italian".
But on its own site, Abu-Hafs al-Masri Brigades denied giving the ultimatum to Italy.
Mr and Mrs Blair arrived in Sardinia on Monday, having already been to Barbados and Athens.