Paris Bomb Hurts 18 at Jewish Film Show

A bomb exploded in a Paris theater during a Jewish film festival Friday, injuring at least 18 people watching the film “Eichmann, Man of the Third Reich,” police said.

One person suffered serious facial burns and two others were taken to the hospital with serious injuries, police said. Others were treated at the scene and released.

The bomb was placed under a seat in the back rows of the basement Rivoli-Beaubourg Theater near the Marais district, a Jewish quarter of Paris. About 50 people were inside when the explosion occurred near the end of the film, which deals with Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal convicted of sending thousands of Jews to their deaths and executed in Israel after trial there in 1961. Eichmann, who fled to Argentina after World War II, was abducted by the Israelis the year before.

No Claim of Responsibility

No one claimed responsibility for Friday’s blast. Paris police said festival organizers had received no threats of violence.

“There was a terrible explosion and a loud bang,” Stephane Serero, a witness, said. “Then plaster from the walls and ceiling came down on us, and the room was full of smoke. I just ran for the door immediately. There was no panic but everybody was scared.”

Some of the injured were hit by falling plaster. The bomb destroyed the theater and left a nearly two-foot-deep crater.

The film, by West German director Erwin Leiser, was part of an International Festival of Jewish Films, which began Wednesday.

The bombing was the second in a month apparently aimed at Jewish targets. In February, a bomb timed to go off at the Saturday opening of a Paris branch of Marks and Spencer, the Jewish-owned British retailer, killed a store employee and injured more than a dozen shoppers.

Attack on Restaurant

In August, 1982, six people died and 22 were injured when several men threw grenades and fired machine-gun rounds into Jo Goldenberg’s, a Jewish restaurant in the same area, a Left Bank neighborhood not far from favored tourist and artist areas.

In October, 1980, four people were killed and nine wounded when a bomb destroyed a Paris synagogue.

Interior Minister Pierre Joxe, who was at the scene Friday, denounced the bombing.

“This is doubly abominable because it happened at a cultural festival, a Jewish film festival,” Joxe said. “Luckily, it seems that none of the injured is in grave danger.”