Italy blast victim 'was anti-war'

By Frances Kennedy
BBC Rome correspondent

Italian investigators are widening their probe into a Moroccan man who blew himself up, after finding a letter from the man saying his suicide was in protest at the war in Iraq.

Thirty-five year old Moustafa Chauki filled his car with gas cylinders and set fire to it outside a McDonalds, in the northern city of Brescia.

Italy's secret services warn of an upsurge of radical Islamic activism

In the letter he specified that he was not a member of al-Qaeda or any terrorist group, but was angry about the war in Iraq and blamed Italy for supporting it.

Mr Chauki had been in Italy for 16 years and was considered well integrated.

But since separating from his wife he had lived alone in a caravan, held intermittent jobs and begun drinking.

Last Sunday he filled his car with gas cylinders and set it alight outside a McDonalds drive-in restaurant in Brescia.

Police initially played down the kamikaze hypothesis.

Radical fears

However, a letter written by Mr Chauki and posted before his death indicates he was planning not just to kill himself.

He says he was acting in the name of Allah for war in Iraq, which punished innocent people, and he criticised Italy for being too friendly with Israel and the US.

Mr Chauki stated that he was not a member of al-Qaeda or any other group.

His gesture raises the spectre of emulation of Islamic terrorist activity by disturbed or depressed individuals.

Italy's secret services have warned about the upsurge of radical Islamic activism in recent months and the risks that individuals or small groups, with no links to organised terror, could embark on attacks here.

Last year a Jordanian man died by blowing himself up in a car near a synagogue in the central Italian city of Modena.