The teenager suspected to have placed an explosive device outside Labour headquarters last week has been admitted to Mount Carmel Hospital for a few days following a psychiatric assessment.
Sources close to the police said the 19-year-old will need to spend a few days at the psychiatric facility before he is re-assessed by specialists to determine whether he is fit for police questioning.
Police arrested the young man on Thursday night but the inquiring magistrate ordered him to undergo a psychiatric assessment to determine whether he can be questioned.
The law requires police to question suspects only if they are in a clear mental state, as the process is among the most crucial parts of the investigation, during which they might incriminate themselves.
Consequently, the man has not been interrogated and there are no arraignment plans yet, but police believe they have gathered enough evidence from CCTV footage and from a search in his garage to charge him.
The teenager is suspected to have manufactured the homemade bomb and placed it outside Labour’s Mile End headquarters in the very early hours of Thursday last week.
The explosive device was found inside a waste bin outside the building and neighbours reported hearing a small explosion coming from the bin that night.
After an intensive search on Thursday, the police zeroed in on the suspect in a Santa Venera garage, where the AFM’s bomb disposal unit found an “alarming” amount of explosive material.
Neighbours living in an apartment block on top of the garage were evacuated until bomb disposal officers removed the material.
Sources said the police suspect the teenager manufactured the explosive in the underground garage, in which they found the material known as TATP, a volatile explosive that is also called ‘mother of Satan’. It is often used in terrorist attacks as it is potent and can be made out of household supplies.
They said the material was powerful enough to shatter the headquarters’ windows and seriously injure people, but luckily enough it was placed in a bin, which contained the blast, and at night, when nobody was around.
Over the weekend sources also said it took bomb disposal officers more than six hours on Friday to remove all the explosive material safely from the garage.
They described it as “very unstable”, meaning it was so volatile that moving it out of the garage risked setting it off.
It was removed and safely disposed of by Friday afternoon, when the building was certified as safe and residents could return to their homes, the sources said.