Man Dies in Bombing Apparently Aimed at Belgian Justice Minister

A bomb apparently meant to kill Belgian Justice Minister Jean Gol exploded in a packed courthouse in the eastern city of Liege on Friday, killing the person who may have been trying to plant the device and wounding several others.

Gol, the hard-line senior deputy premier in charge of law and order in Belgium, had been due to attend a swearing-in ceremony for young lawyers in the building but was detained in Brussels by an important parliamentary debate.

Witnesses said Gol’s name was on the printed invitations for the ceremony, which was about to begin when the blast went off.

The dead man’s body was badly mutilated and could not be immediately identified, police said. Gol, who visited the scene, said the victim may have been responsible for the blast.

No one claimed responsibility for the bombing, but officials said it may have been the work of the Fighting Communist Cells (CCC) guerrillas who carried out two other bomb attacks earlier Friday on a North Atlantic Treaty Organization fuel pipeline in central Belgium and the offices of the allied agency which operates the pipeline in Versailles, France.

Statement Found

A six-page CCC statement found in central Brussels said an unspecified “international Communist group in France” had helped in the Versailles bombing. The Fighting Communist Cells have previously been linked to the French terrorist group Direct Action.

It said a third attack on a different stretch of the NATO pipeline near Mons failed because of a technical hitch.

Belgian radio said another unexploded device was found in front of a bank in one of the main avenues of central Brussels on Friday afternoon along with CCC leaflets.

The bombings and several hoaxes caused scenes of confusion and massive traffic jams in the capital, as well as in Liege and Ghent.

The two earlier bombs detonated within minutes of each other around 5 a.m., local time at NATO’s Central European Operating Agency in Versailles and in a pipeline valve chamber in central Belgium. No one was hurt in those blasts.

Friday’s attacks occurred almost exactly a year after the Belgian group, in its most spectacular action, set off six bombs within a few hours along the pipeline carrying fuel from the Atlantic and North Sea ports to front-line forces and air bases in West Germany.