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Antonio Calanni / AP

The coffin containing the remains of Melissa Bassi, killed by a bomb in Brindisi, Italy, on May 19, is carried at her funeral two days after the blast..

ROME - Italian police took a 68-year-old man into custody on Wednesday in connection with last month's bombing near a school that killed a 16-year-old girl and wounded 10 others, local media reported Thursday.

Investigators initially suggested a mafia group was responsible for the May 19 bomb that was detonated in Brindisi, a port city in southern Italy.

After several hours of questioning in the southern city of Lecce, the man allegedly confessed to building and planting the bomb, Italian media reported.

The man, whose motive was described as a "personal" vendetta and not terrorism, is married and has two children, according to local reports.

Television news channel Sky Italia named the suspect as Giovanni Vantaggiato, an agricultural fuel depot owner from nearby Cupertino, adding that police and prosecutors were still working to verify details in his apparent admission.

The investigation into the bombing made "an important and definitive breakthrough" Wednesday, the head of the police force, Antonio Manganelli, told Reuters after news of a possible confession was reported.

Vataggiato’s apparent motive was described in Italian newspaper La Repubblica [linked site in Italian] as anger over personal debt.

Reuters and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.

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Updated at 9.10 a.m ET: An explosion at a school in Italy Saturday killed a teenage girl and injured several others, according to reports and officials.

The blast happened at 7:45 a.m. at a school in Brindisi as students were waiting to go inside, NBC News reported.

The high school, which is opposite a court in the city, is named after the slain anti-Mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone and his wife, Francesca Morvillo, a judge who was also killed in the 1992 bombing in Sicily by Cosa Nostra. 

One of the wounded students, a girl who was walking alongside the victim outside the school in Brindisi, was reported in critical condition after surgery.

Officials said at least seven students were injured, but some news reports put the figure at 10. 

Brindisi's Perrino hospital, where the wounded were taken, declined to give out information by phone. 

Dr. Paola Ciannamea, a Perrino physician who helped treat the injured at the hospital, told reporters there that one of the injured was a teenage girl who was in grave but stable condition after surgery.

She added that plastic surgery was still being performed on some of the other injured, who suffered burns in the blast. 

No claim of responsibility
An unidentified hospital official, briefing reporters there, said the critically injured student was in stable condition after surgery and that several of the injured students had suffered burns and is undergoing plastic surgery. 

Max Frigione / AP

Notebooks are seen scattered at the site where an explosive device went off near the Francesca Morvillo Falcone High School in Brindisi, Italy, Saturday.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility. 

Italy has been marking the 20th anniversary of the Sicilian highway attack, but it was unclear if there was an organized crime link to Saturday's explosion. 

In Brindisi, local civil protection agency official Fabiano Amati said a female student died of her wounds after being taken to a hospital and at least seven other students were hospitalized. 

Interior Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri, in charge of domestic security, said she was "struck" by the fact that the school was named after the slain hero and his wife, but she cautioned that investigators at that point "have no elements" to blame the school attack on organized crime. 

"It's not the usual (method) for the Mafia," she told Sky television in a phone interview. The Sicilian-based Cosa Nostra usually targets specific figures, such as judges, prosecutors, turncoats or rival mobsters in attacks, and not civilian targets such as schools. 

"The big problem now is to get intelligence" on the attack, said Cancellieri. She added that she had spoken by phone with Italian Premier Mario Monti, in the United States for the G-8 summit. 

Outside the school, textbooks, their pages flipping in a breeze, notebooks and a backpack littered the street near where the bomb exploded. At the sound of the blast, students already inside the building ran outside of the school to see what happened. 

Officials initially said the device was in a trash bin outside the Morvillo-Falcone school, but later the ANSA news agency, reporting from Brindisi, said the device, consisting of three cooking-gas canisters, a detonator and possibly a timer, had been placed on a low wall ringing the school. The wall was damaged and charred from the blast. 

Public high schools in Italy hold classes on Saturday mornings. 

Specializes in fashion, social services
A school official, Valeria Vitale, told Sky that most of the pupils were girls. The school specializes in training for jobs in fashion and social services, she said. 

The bombing also follows a number of attacks against Italian officials and government or public buildings by a group of anarchists, which prompted authorities to assign bodyguards for 550 individuals and deploy 16,000 law enforcement officers nationwide. 

Minister Cancellieri indicated that after the school blast, authorities' sense of what could be a possible target had been tested. 

"Anything now could be a 'sensitive' target," she said. 

Austerity measures, spending cuts and new and higher taxes, all part of economist Monti's plan to save Italy from succumbing to the debt crisis roiling Greece, have angered many citizens, and social tensions have ratcheted up. 

"The economic crisis doesn't help," Cancellieri said, referring to the tensions. 

Brindisi is a lively port town in Puglia, the region in the southeastern "heel" of the Italian boot-shaped peninsula. An organized crime syndicate known as the Sacred United Crown, has been traditionally active there, but crackdowns have been widely considered by authorities to have lessened the organization's power in the region.

The Associated Press and NBC News' Claudio Lavanga contributed to this report.

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Updated at 10:30 p.m. ET: The gunman who fatally shot three children a young rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France on Monday remains at large after fleeing the scene on a moped through the city's backstreets. The killer has been described by French media as the "most wanted man in France," since President Nicolas Sarkozy said the bullets from a .45-caliber pistol he used matched one that was used in two previous fatal attacks in the last two weeks.

"This act is horrific and cannot remain unpunished," Sarkozy said in a televised address, adding that the terrorism alert level in France had been raised to its highest level ever. Sarkozy flew to Toulouse.

The killer was described as a short, overweight man who behaved calmly and appeared to handle his weapons with ease. He wears a helmet and rides the same stolen scooter. His victims have been ethnic minorities -- Jewish, North African or Jewish -- witnesses have said that in one of the attacks, the killer pushed aside a bystander to get to his victims, the BBC reported.

According to Le Figaro, a French newspaper, Sgt. Imad Ibn-Ziaten had posted a classified advertisement selling a motorcycle, and the suspect made plans to see it on Sunday, March 11. Ibn-Ziaten waited behind a school in a quiet area of Toulouse, essentially waiting for his killer to show up.

Because of these details, some fear the suspect may be a serial killer driven by racism.

"Everything leads one to believe that these were racist and anti-Semitic acts," Toulouse Mayor Pierre Cohen said on BFM-TV.

The gunman arrived at the Ozar-Hatorah middle and high school around 8:15 a.m. Monday morning and shot at people waiting on the curb for a shuttle, LaDepeche, the Toulouse newspaper reported. He killed 30-year old Hebrew teacher Jonathan Sandler, his two children, Arye, 6, and Gabriel, 3; and Miriam Monsonego, 8, the daughter of the school principal,  Toulouse prosecutor Michel Valet said.

The gunman chased 8-year-old Miriam into the concrete courtyard, stopping her by her hair, The New York Times reported. That's when his gun jammed. Still holding her, he switched weapons and shot her in the head.

A 17-year-old was seriously wounded.

Some 120 investigators were working on a manhunt for the killer and had already identified the license plate of the motorbike used in Monday's attack at the private Ozar Hatorah school, police sources said. The gunman used a second gun when the first jammed, the Toulouse prosecutor said.

French media said that security was being tightened at all Jewish schools in the country.

Religious minorities and issues of race have emerged as a prominent issue in France's current presidential campaign. The soldiers killed and injured were of North African and French Caribbean origin.

The assailant used a heavy-caliber firearm and another weapon. At least 15 shots were fired.

Nicole Yardeni, a local Jewish official who saw security video of the attack from the single camera near the school gate, described the shooter as "determined, athletic and well-toned." She said he wore a helmet with the visor down.

"You see a man park his motorcycle, start to shoot, enter the school grounds and chase children to catch one and shoot a bullet into her head," Yardeni said. "It's unbearable to watch and you can't watch anymore after that. He was looking to kill."

Parents who witnessed the incident -- which happened shortly before 8 a.m. local time (3 a.m. ET), as children were being dropped off at the school -- described the scene.

"I saw two people dead in front of the school, an adult and a child ... Inside, it was a vision of horror, the bodies of two small children," a distraught father told RTL radio, Reuters reported.

PhotoBlog: Images from the scene of the Toulouse school shooting

"I did not find my son, apparently he fled when he saw what happened. How can they attack something as sacred as a school, attack children only sixty centimeters [about two feet] tall?'' he added.

"It was terrible ... It felt like it lasted a long time," Charles Ben Semoun, a parent of a child at the school, told i-tele television, the Bloomberg news service said.

It was the worst anti-Semitic incident in France since August 1982, when six people were killed in a grenade attack and subsequent shooting at the Goldenberg restaurant in a Jewish neighborhood on Rue des Rosiers in central Paris. France's 600,000-strong Jewish community is Europe's largest.

The bodies were brought in hearses to the school Monday night for an evening vigil. All of the dead had joint Israeli-French citizenship and will be buried in Israel, the Israel Foreign Ministry said.

Monday's shootings come days after three soldiers were killed in two separate shootings in the same area by a man who also escaped from the scene by motorbike.

On March 10, a gunman shot and killed a paratrooper in Toulouse. Last Thursday, a masked gunman on a motorbike opened fire on three uniformed paratroopers at an ATM machine in Montauban, about 30 miles from Toulouse, killing two and critically wounding the other.

NBC News, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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