UK police hunt two men over school nail-bomb blast
UK police are today looking for two men seen near a school where a home-made nail bomb exploded inside a teacher’s car.
Pupils narrowly escaped injury when the device, thought to be a large firework with nails buried inside, went off only minutes before the end of the school day.
No one was injured in the blast in the car park outside Runnymede St Edward’s school in, Liverpool at around 2.50pm yesterday.
Merseyside Police said one of the men was white, stocky, about 5ft 10in and aged between 40 and 50 with light-coloured hair.
They have no description of the second man.
A police spokesman said the car was being examined by forensic officers, and detectives were conducting house-to-house inquiries.
Detectives will also examine CCTV from outside the school and forensic evidence gathered from the scene.
Superintendent Ian Pilling, from Merseyside Police, said it was a “despicable” crime.
“Certainly from what I have seen, anybody in the vicinity of the vehicle could have been injured or killed,” he said.
“This was a despicable offence. Children were in the process of leaving. Nobody was killed or injured but that was down to good luck.”
The car, a silver saloon, was parked 30ft from the windows of the £4,500-a-year independent school.
Fragments of nails and shattered glass from the windows of the car were sent flying into the air when the device detonated.
Around 300 pupils were still in their classrooms awaiting the end of the school day at 3pm. They were kept inside as police checked the car before being evacuated later.
Officers said they did not know whether the teacher who owned the car had been targeted directly.
Mr Pilling said: “At this stage we can’t say if somebody was targeting a teacher; there is nothing indicating why anybody would target this teacher.”
He urged parents collecting their children, or members of the public who might have seen anything suspicious, to contact officers.
St Edward’s is a Catholic school for children aged between three and 11. It is the choir school to the city’s Metropolitan cathedral.
