by fwd from cnn
Thursday, May. 22, 2003 at 12:10 PM
NEW HAVEN, Conn., May 21 — A bomb exploded Wednesday in a mail room at the Yale University law school, FBI and police officials told NBC News. There was no immediate report of injuries, but damage was described as heavy, and witnesses said they saw a blast of debris.
BONNIE WINCHESTER, a spokeswoman for the New Haven police, told NBC affiliate WVIT-TV in Hartford that the building was not on fire but that the floor partly collapsed and damaged the room below.
An FBI spokesman told NBC News that the blast was caused by an explosive device in the mail room and that members of the FBI’s terrorism task force were on the scene.
A witness told WVIT that she saw a wall of the law school’s alumni lounge collapse after the bomb exploded about 4:40 p.m. ET. “A lot of bomb people are here right now,” another witness told the station by cellular telephone.
Police evacuated the building and closed off the city block around the law school, and witnesses reported seeing children running from the building’s child-care center.
Winchester said she knew of no injuries, noting that the explosion occurred late in the day and that few people would have been in the building.
The explosion occurred almost exactly 10 years after the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, mailed a bomb to Yale that severely injured a professor in June 1993.
It came as the nation was on elevated alert for possible terrorist attacks and several hours after President Bush, a Yale alumnus, visited the state to speak at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduation ceremony in New London.
But a senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News that none of the current intelligence about possible terror attacks mentioned an attack on a university, a college or a law school.
By MSNBC.com’s Alex Johnson with NBC News’ Jim Popkin, Robert Windrem and Olivia Santini.