The World - News from Jan. 1, 1987

A bomb apparently planted by South Tyrolean extremists exploded outside a hotel in the northern Italian city of Merano where Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti was sleeping, causing some damage but no injuries. Police said the bomb--4 1/2 pounds of plastic explosives packed in a metal pipe--was set off by a timer, shooting a large fragment into a room at the Palace Hotel. Police and Andreotti said the blast may have been the work of German-speaking extremists who have for years been demanding the return of the South Tyrolean border region to Austria. Police dismissed a claim by a group in Beirut calling itself the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Brigades that it had set off the bomb.