Students stand in front of the site where an explosive device went off near the “Francesca Morvillo Falcone” high school in Brindisi, Italy, Saturday. — AP


ROME — Italian Interior Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri Saturday said investigators were looking into “numerous” possible motives for a school bombing that killed two 16-year-old girls and injured six more.

“There are numerous hypotheses and no single one is certain,” Cancellieri said in an interview with news channel SkyTG24. Cancellieri added that the attack was “complex” and “unusual” without elaborating.

Two girls died and other teens were gravely injured Saturday in the powerful bomb blast outside their school named after a woman killed by the mafia with her judge husband in 1992. School officials said the blast, which went off outside the building as students were arriving for class at the all-girls Francesca Morvillo Falcone vocational school in the southern city of Brindisi, knocked several of them to the ground.

“I had just gone into the bar in front of the school. I saw everything falling. I don’t remember anything else. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back. There’s something missing now,” one survivor told local television.

An employee at the prosecutor’s office next to the school told the Repubblica daily: “I was opening the window and the blast wave hit me. I saw kids on the ground. All blackened. Their books on fire. It was terrifying.”

Local emergency official Fabiano Amati told the news channel Sky Tg24 one 16-year-old girl “did not survive”. Hospital official Paola Ciannamea told reporters that one of the injured girls, also 16, who had initially been reported as dead by police sources cited by Italian media, was alive but in a “very serious condition.”

A second injured girl could lose her legs and two others have burns all over their bodies. Five other students were reported suffering only light injuries.

Italian media cited officials saying that the device was composed of gas canisters hidden in a container near a wall at the entrance of the school. The school’s director Valeria Vitale was quoted as saying by the daily La Repubblica: “The first people to come to the aid of the injured were a teacher, a monitor and a technician... The students are in shock.”

Police quickly cordoned off the school and bomb disposal experts rushed to the scene. The area was strewn with debris and one wall was blackened. The blast went off around 0545 GMT. Most Italian students have classes on Saturday morning. Other city schools sent their students home.

No one has claimed responsibility for the blast. — Agencies