Bombs Found in Dutch Ikea Stores

Police sealed off all Ikea stores in the Netherlands today after at least two bombs were found at branches of the world's biggest furniture retailer.

Two explosives experts suffered minor injuries as they disarmed one of the bombs, police said, while Ikea shut its 10 Dutch stores and told its 4,000 employees to stay home.

The Ikea stores had been braced for a flood of shoppers in the busy run-up to the Christmas holidays. Workers at Ikea's busy Amsterdam branch were turned back at the main entrance when they reported for work.

Officers were searching for more explosives at all the Swedish-based company's branches in Holland. Bombs were found at stores in Amsterdam and Sliedrecht, a town near the port city of Rotterdam, and taken to police stations to be disarmed.

The Sliedrecht device exploded at a police station, where it had been taken to be defused. Two policement were injured, a statement said. One officer was briefly treated at a hospital for light injuries; the other was injured in the eye.

Police officials declined to give details on the type of explosives used in the device, how they were discovered, or about who was responsible.

Police also closed off a section of the A-12 highway in the central Dutch city Utrecht near the third Ikea store where a "suspicious-looking package" was discovered and destroyed.

Amsterdam police declined to say if the package in Utrecht looked similar to the bombs at the other stores in Amsterdam and Sliedrecht.

The discovery of the bombs coincides with the first terrorism trial in the Netherlands since the September 11 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, but police said there was no apparent connection.

Two Algerians, a Frenchman and a Dutchman of Ethiopian origin, believed to have ties to al-Qaida, face allegations of conspiring to attack US targets in Europe, including a US embassy in Paris and a military depot in Belgium.

The trial is expected to conclude later today and a verdict is anticipated within three weeks.

Sweden's ambassador to theresuscitation of the Middle East peace process. It could see US troops withdraw from Saudi Arabia, or the world's richest nations finally wean themselves off fossil fuels and the accompanying desire to control the region that produces them. Of course, such steps will not impress Osama bin Laden and his army of medieval absolutists: they are fanatics who will only be satisfied when every last infidel is dead. But it might appeal to the constituency that currently allows him and his al-Qaida devotees to thrive in their midst.

This surely is the smart formula: a hawk's face for the killers, a dove's for the cheerers. In the Blairite cliché: tough on terror, tough on the causes of g beds, sofas, kitchen equipment, lighting and toys.

The company, which opened its first store in the Netherlands in 1979, generates sales of more than £6bn a year around the world. Ikea's headquarters in Sweden could not be reached for immediate comment.