Powerful Bomb Found Near Eiffel Tower’s Top

Police found and defused a powerful bomb high on the Eiffel Tower, just blocks from where another explosive device blew up, injuring eight people on the fashionable Avenue des Champs Elysees, a spokesman for the tower’s directors said today.

A group calling itself the “Committee of Solidarity with Arab and Middle Eastern Political Prisoners” claimed responsibility for the Champs Elysees bomb in a letter to a French news agency today. It said it was seeking the release of two Arabs and an Armenian jailed in France.

The spokesman said an Eiffel Tower employee discovered the second bomb about 10 p.m. Monday behind a toilet in a public lavatory three-quarters of the way up the 984-foot tower, one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions.

Security guards evacuated the tower while police defused the device, which television reports said was timed to go off at 1 a.m. today, an hour after the tower closes to the public.

Three people were seriously injured and five others suffered minor injuries Monday evening in an explosion outside the Galerie Claridge, a luxury clothing store on the Champs Elysees, police said. Five were hospitalized.

Late today, an explosion rocked a crowded bookshop in the Latin Quarter. The blast, which injured three people, occurred at about 7:30 p.m. at Joseph Gibert bookshop on the Place Saint Michel, triggering a fire in the crowded on the square. Police were unable to say whether the explosion was caused by a bomb.