The discovery of a letter bomb in the office of a Jewish communal organization Tuesday morning has put the entire British Jewish community on the alert and triggered a major police investigation.
Scotland Yard and officials of the Board of Deputies of British Jews have urged Jews all over country to exercise maximum vigilance.
Board of Deputies officials telephoned communal organizations throughout the country to make sure the “be vigilant” message struck home.
“This appears to have been an incendiary device and could have caused injury to anyone who opened it,” a police spokesman said.
The target was Jewish Care, a welfare organization that has offices in Golders Green, northwest London.
Anti-terrorist squad detectives and bomb squad officers were called to the scene. The building and others in the vicinity, including the Menorah Primary School and the Michael Sobell Day Center for the Elderly, were evacuated.
Julian Snowman, a postal clerk employed by Jewish Care, discovered the device in the morning mail, only a few days after a threatening letter had been received. He said he became suspicious because the 7-by-5-inch brown, padded envelope had no return address and felt as though there were metal inside it.
The envelope was addressed in press-on lettering to the Jewish Welfare Board, Jewish Care’s former name. “I recognized the lettering as being similar to a letter we had received a week earlier,” Snowman said.
That letter, mailed in the Islington section of London, threatened “death” and was signed by “Mulhazin (Arabic for colonel) Mamzart Islam.”
But the police said they do not believe the bomb came from an Arab terrorist group.
A spokesman for the Board of Deputies’ community security organization said the letter bomb was the first to be delivered to a Jewish organization in “many years.”
He said it was an escalation of recent attacks and threats against the Jewish community, including arson at a school and two synagogues in London and Birmingham, and anti-Semitic daubings on gravestones at Jewish cemeteries.
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