- ROME -- Is Lucifer loose
on Sicily? No lesser figure than the honorary president of the International
Association of Exorcists believes he may be.
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- "What is happening is what normally happens when
the devil enters the lives of those who let him in," Father Gabriele
Amorth said yesterday as scientists and officials confessed themselves
unable to explain a string of fires and explosions which began in the middle
of last month in the fishermen's quarter of a Sicilian village.
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- Thirty-nine inhabitants of Caronia, on the north coast,
were preparing to spend their third night away from their homes last night,
having been evacuated at the weekend.
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- Since then, in an operation that could have come straight
from the television series X Files, a multi-disciplinary team of experts
armed with measuring devices has been examining the area for clues to the
spontaneous combustion of washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators,
electricity meters and cables.
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- Gianfranco Allegra, of the Italian Centre for Electro-technical
Experimentation, told the newspaper Corriere della Sera that he had watched
as "an electrical wire lying on the floor that was not plugged in
to the mains inexplicably caught fire". When he reported the incident
to his superiors in Milan he was told to sober up.
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- What makes the incidents all the more puzzling is that
the area has been without an electricity supply since January 4.
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- On Monday the affair took a new turn when a chair burst
into flames. Then a fire started in a water pipe.
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- The mayor of Caronia, Pedro Spinnato, said yesterday:
"I have no idea what is going on."
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- He believed that arson had been ruled out.
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- Tullio Martella, the regional civil defence chief, said
the fires and blasts seemed to derive "from a dispersion of electrical
energy, but the origin of the presumed dispersion has yet to be determined".
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- The houses in which the fires have broken out are all
in an area 350 metres (about 380 yards) by 70 metres between the shoreline
and a railway.
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- At first suspicion centred on the railway line, but that
has now been discounted.
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- Yesterday technicians were busy measuring emissions from
local mobile telephone facilities.
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- But Fr Amorth said they should not rule out vibes of
a different sort.
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- "The priest of the parish ought today to go and
bless all the houses that have witnessed paranormal phenomena, because
that is what they are," he said.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,12576,1145394,00.html
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