U.S. embassy in Montenegro is attacked, but only attacker is killed

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February 22, 2018 5:29 AM

A man threw an explosive device onto the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Montenegro late Wednesday night, but succeeded only in killing himself, the State Department said.

Around midnight local time, witnesses saw the man, who was not identified, throw an object over the wall of the embassy property in Podgorica, the capital, according to Steve Goldstein, the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs.

The blast killed the man but did not injure anyone in the embassy, which was closed for the night. Diplomatic security officials swept the grounds and found no other explosives, Goldstein said, and the building was not damaged. The embassy has asked local employees to stay home on Thursday as a security precaution.

Goldstein said the State Department did not know what the motive for the assault was or whether it was meant to be a suicide attack.

Montenegro, one of the world’s youngest nations, is a tiny country of 640,000 nestled between Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo and Albania. It was once part of Yugoslavia; later, it became half the nation of Serbia and Montenegro before declaring independence in 2006.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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