Italy bombing sparks protests as police hunt for killer

ROME: Students called for justice yesterday at the scene of a deadly bomb attack in Italy as police widened their search for a man caught on camera as he set off the blast by remote.
"Melissa is one of us! Whoever killed her must die!" students shouted at a sit-in at the school in the southern city of Brindisi, where Saturday's blast killed 16-year-old Melissa Bassi and gravely injured five more girls.
Italian police meanwhile were re-examining blurry video footage which showed the aggressor setting off the blast but did not show his full face.
"Surveillance cameras positioned on a newspaper kiosk close to the school clearly show a man, at the moment of the attack, who seems to be using a remote control," Interior Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri said.
"Investigators believe it is the person who set off the explosion because the sequence of images shows a tremor, then a cloud of smoke," she said.
"Immediately afterwards, the individual headed off behind the kiosk towards an adjacent street and disappeared from the camera's field of view," she added.
Investigators in Brindisi had earlier released images showing a man with slicked-back hair and apparently with a lame hand and a limp outside the school pressing a remote control or mobile phone just before the bomb exploded.
A local man whose description matched that of the man caught on film was widely named in the national media as the aggressor and was interrogated on Monday by police, but was later released on grounds of insufficient evidence.
As the man and his brother were driven out of the police station and escorted home, angry locals attacked a police car they thought he was in.
"It was a nightmare, I am an honest man. I had nothing to do with the bomb," the man said in a video interview published by La Stampa yesterday.
Students told investigators they had seen a man corresponding to the police identikit lurking around the school a week or so before the attack, and had nicknamed him "the maniac," the Corriere della Sera newspaper said.
The blast ripped through a group of students as they waited to begin classes, killing Bassi and leaving five others with burn wounds.