Egypt Arrests Man After Nail Bomb Attack On German Embassy

Police in Egypt on Wednesday arrested a man who tossed four homemade nail bombs into the German embassy grounds and attacked the entrance with a hammer but injured nobody and caused no serious damage, the embassy and security sources said.

The man acted out of anger after reading an Egyptian newspaper report on Friday which described a protest by German right-wing activists who had paraded caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in front of a German mosque, they said.

Many Muslims consider any depiction of the Prophet to be offensive – a series of cartoons in a Danish newspaper in 2005 on the same subject sparked protests across the Islamic world.

“It was just one person who attacked the embassy and damaged the glass of the entrance with a hammer,” said a spokeswoman for the German embassy. “There was no major damage and no one hurt.”

The man was also brandishing a toy pistol, she added, and had used a hammer to crack the entrance’s toughened glass. He had brought copies of the offending newspaper article with him.

Reuters