SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- Police began a manhunt Thursday for a former tax worker suspected of targeting government officials with letter bombs, and additional bomb scares prompted the evacuation of major buildings in three cities.
Police cordoned off Sydney's Centrepoint Tower, a major tourist attraction that also houses the headquarters of the Australian Tax Office, which had been targeted by letter bombs.Similar scares over suspicious packages found in Melbourne's ANZ Tower and the Northern Territory Parliament Building in Darwin turned out to be false alarms.
In Queensland Thursday, police detonated a bomb found at a home in the normally idyllic oceanfront vacation community on the Gold Coast.
Authorities announced that they were looking for 43-year-old Colin George Dunstan of Canberra, who they said was suspected of mailing at least 25 letter bombs -- Australia's biggest terrorist campaign.
Dunstan's neighbors said he was a former Australian Taxation Office employee who had been out of work for several years.
On Wednesday, a nationwide alert was issued after 21 letter bombs were found at the Canberra mail sorting center after one exploded, slightly injuring two postal workers.
The previous day a letter bomb had been delivered to a private Sydney address, but it was defused by the police bomb squad when the person became suspicious.
Another two parcel bombs were delivered to homes in Sydney and Melbourne on Wednesday.
Most of the potentially deadly parcels had been addressed to former or current Australian Taxation Office staff, but some members of the Human Rights Commission also had been targeted.
One reportedly was sent to the Sydney home of federal privacy commissioner Moira Scollay and another to the Melbourne home of former federal sex discrimination commissioner Sue Walpole.