MALLORCA TODAY - Bauzá assures Balearics people following foiled university bomb plot

José Ramón Bauzá, president of the Balearics, has issued a message stressing calmness and security following the arrest yesterday morning of 21-year-old Juan Manuel M.S. when he was in the act of acquiring explosives with which he had intended planting pipe bombs at the University of the Balearic Islands in emulating the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in the USA. Interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, has praised the efforts of police ("a truly brilliant operation") in preventing what he believes would have been a massacre at the university. The 21-year-old, a Spanish electronics student, had been in the process of receiving 140 kilos of explosive acquired via the internet. The university rector, Monserrat Casas, has said that the university is operating normally and has echoed the president's sentiments regarding calmness, adding that a bomb attack would have been one against liberty and democracy. She has denied that the university had received any written threat of an attack.The national government delegate for the Balearics, Teresa Palmer, has also supported Bauzá's message, stressing the foiled attack was an isolated incident and that people in the Balearics should have full confidence in the police who had apparently been monitoring Juan Manuel M.S. for some months. She has added that the police do not believe that he was associated with any political movement or group.

Update: Some information about the Mallorcan Juan Manuel Morales Sierra is now emerging. A student at Palma's polytechnic, the picture is being painted of a solitary young man who lived in a world of his own, mainly on the internet. The photo that has been released of him is in a way quite shocking. He looks very ordinary and very normal.