National Post (National Edition)

Italian gunman targeting politician­s

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A Carabinier­e paramilita­ry police officer lies on the ground after being shot outside the Chigi premier’s office on Sunday in Rome. ering, second-century ancient Roman column honouring Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Rome was packed Sunday with people enjoying the last day of a four-day weekend.

Fanuel Morelli, a cameraman working for AP Television, said he was struck by the gunman’s firm, calm stance.

“When I heard the first shot, I turned around and saw a man standing there, some 15 metres away from me. He held his arm out and I saw him fire another five, six shots,” Mr. Morelli said. “He was firing at the second Carabinier­e, who was about 4 metres in front of him.”

Mr. Laviani said Mr. Preiti, who was taken to the hospital for bruises, confessed to the shooting and didn’t appear mentally unbalanced.

“He is a man full of problems, who lost his job, who lost everything,” the prosecutor said. “He was desperate. In general, he wanted to shoot at politician­s, but given that he couldn’t reach any, he shot at the Carabinier­i” paramilita­ry police.

Doctors at Rome’s Umberto I Polyclinic said a 50-year-old brigadier had been hit in the neck by a bullet that damaged his spinal column and was lodged near his shoulder. The doctors said it wasn’t yet known if the spinal column injury had caused any paralysis.

The head of St. John’s Hospital, Gianluigi Bracciale, told Sky TG24 TV the second officer suffered a broken leg from a gunshot. He said Prieti didn’t appear to have any injuries other than bruises.

Preiti’s uncle, interviewe­d by Sky, said the alleged gunman had moved back to his parents’ home in Calabria because he could no longer find work as a bricklayer. “He was a great worker. He could build a house from top to bottom,” said the uncle, Domenco Preiti.

The shooting sparked ugly memories of the 1970s and 1980s in Italy, when domestic terrorism plagued the country during a time of high political tensions between right-wing and left-wing blocs.

A possible gas explosion ripped off the side of a five-storey residentia­l building in France’s Champagne country on Sunday, killing at least two people and injuring 14 others, officials said. Search teams extracted a victim’s body as they pored over the rubble in a hunt for possible survivors. More than 100 rescue workers, firefighte­rs, sniffer-dog squads and bomb and gas experts rushed to the gutted building in a subsidized housing complex in the city of Reims, east of Paris, officials said. Heaps of debris spilled out of the building onto a grassy esplanade below. “The explosion of a residentia­l building in Reims is a terrible drama,” the office of French President François Hollande said in a statement, conveying his condolence­s to the victims’ relatives. The Interior Ministry also issued a statement saying two people died and 14 people were injured.

A Dutch citizen arrested in northeast Spain on suspicion of launching what is described as the biggest cyberattac­k in Internet history operated from a bunker and had a van capable of hacking into networks anywhere in the country, officials said Sunday. The suspect travelled in Spain using his van “as a mobile computing office, equipped with various antennas to scan frequencie­s,” an Interior Ministry statement said. Agents arrested him Thursday in the city of Granollers, 35 kilometres north of Barcelona, complying with a European arrest warrant issued by Dutch authoritie­s. .

The mini-stroke suffered by Algeria’s president has cast fresh doubt on his perceived ambition to run for a fourth term next year as leader of one of Africa’s largest and richest countries. The possibilit­y that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 76, could step down could affect the stability of this key U.S. ally in the fight against terror but might also open up its long-stagnant politics. Bouteflika on Saturday had a brief blockage of a cerebral blood vessel known as a transient ischemic attack, which authoritie­s said he quickly recovered from and had no lasting complicati­ons.

One of the architects of failed U.S. gun control legislatio­n says he’s bringing it back. Sen. Joe Manchin on Sunday said he would re-introduce a measure that would require criminal and mental health background checks for gun buyers at shows and online. The Democrat says that if lawmakers read the bill, they will support it. Mr. Manchin sponsored a previous version of the measure with Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvan­ia. It failed. Mr. Manchin says there was confusion over what was in the bill. Congress took up gun control legislatio­n in the wake of the school shooting that killed 20 children and six adults in Connecticu­t last year.

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