Italian bomb attack "not mafia" A bomb attack outside a school in southern Italy that killed a 16-year-old girl and wounded about a dozen other students was probably the isolated act of an individual and not the mafia, according to investigators who have found video footage of a man apparently triggering the devastating explosion by remote control. The attack in the Adriatic port of Brindisi on Saturday morning has stunned the nation, triggering rallies of support for the grieving families, while unleashing a wave of speculation that Italy, in a time of deep recession and political instability, risks being plunged again into the mafia-led violence that erupted 20 years ago or the ideologically inspired atrocities of the 1970s. Local officials initially suspected the blast was the work of the United Sacred Crown, as the fragmented mafia groups are known in that area, pointing out that the targeted vocational school was named after Giovanni Falcone, an anti-mafia prosecutor, and his wife Francesca Morvillo, a judge, who were both killed by the Sicilian mafia on May 23, 1992. A rally organised by anti-mafia groups that was touring Italy to mark the 20th anniversary of their deaths had been due to arrive in Brindisi later on Saturday. However, Marco Dinapoli, Brindisi's chief prosecutor leading the investigation, said on Sunday that the hypothesis of a mafia attack was "improbable" though not excluded, and that the explosion was probably the isolated act of an individual, for reasons yet unknown. He said footage secured from a nearby video camera appears to show a man using a remote control to set off the device from a distance. The bomb was made of three gas canisters, that sent shards of metal as far as 500 metres and engulfed the students in flames. It may also have had a mechanism that after being activated remotely triggered the blast with the movement of the students entering the school for morning classes, with Melissa Bassi, the teenager killed in the blast, among those closest. It could be the act of a man who feels at war with the whole world, or feels a victim of the world. It could also be someone who wanted to create social tensions with an ideology," Mr Dinapoli said, noting that the suspect was relatively expert in electronics. La Stampa, a Turin daily, summed up the mood of a shocked nation struggling to make sense of the atrocity by expressing the hope in its editorial that the attack was indeed the act of a madman and not an organisation, whether criminal or ideological. The daily Il Fatto, however, warned that the attack "opens a new season of terror." The bombing followed several relatively minor attacks on public institutions, including the main debt collection agency, and the wounding two weeks ago of the manager of a state-controlled nuclear energy company which may have been carried out by anarchists. Giorgio Napolitano, head of state, praised the spontaneous outpourings of support across Italy for the victims of the Brindisi attack and declared that the state would not be intimidated.