Woman dead in Greece after bomb explodes in her hands

A woman in the Greek city of Thessaloniki died Saturday after a bomb blew up in her hands.

The explosion at around 5 a.m. blasted back the woman between two cars. First responders took her to a hospital where she died within minutes of arriving, according to Greece’s Skai news website.

A local resident told Greek news site Voria, “I felt the apartment building go up and down from the huge explosion. It was like an earthquake, like houses were falling.”

Greek authorities haven’t publicly named the 38-year-old victim but said she had a criminal record of robbery, theft, drug charges and prostitution, reported The Associated Press.

The woman was near a bank branch and ATM at the time of the blast, though Greek police aren’t certain if she was intending to place the bomb there when it went off. The device, they said, was set off with a fuse.

Investigators “are looking for evidence of exactly where the device would be placed, while we do not know if she finally managed to complete this act, if she really wanted to place the device at that specific point, as we had this tragic result and it was lost in such a bad way,” Hellenic Police spokeswoman Constantia Dimoglidou told Greece’s ERT News.