Author: Souhail Karam in Casablanca
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: May 17, 2003
URL: http://www.rediff.com/us/2003/may/17moro.htm
At least 40 people were killed and
about 100 wounded in suicide bomb attacks in Morocco's biggest city Casablanca
on Friday night, diplomatic sources in the capital Rabat said on Saturday.
Among the targets were a Jewish
community centre and a Spanish club and restaurant in downtown Casablanca.
No group has claimed responsibility
for the attacks.
"International terrorism struck
Casablanca tonight," Moroccan Interior Minister Al Mustapha Sahel was quoted
as saying by 2M television in the early hours of Saturday.
This was the first major attack
of its type in Morocco in recent years and followed suicide bombings of
expatriate housing compounds in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Monday that
killed 34.
Like the Riyadh assault, Osama bin
Laden's Al Qaeda was the prime suspect in Casablanca. A US official said
it was 'plausible' to suggest that the group Washington blames for the
September 11 hijacks was behind the latest coordinated attack.
Sahel said the terrorists struck
at the Hotel Safir in the old heart of the city, a Jewish community centre,
an old Jewish cemetery and the Casa de Espana Spanish social club. Local
journalists said the bulk of the dead were at the club.
"There are body parts all over the
place," Moroccan journalist Aboubakr Jamai told the BBC, describing an
eyewitness account from the Spanish restaurant, where one report said a
young attacker had blown himself up with a grenade in his belt.
The Belgian embassy in Rabat said
two policemen outside its Casablanca consulate were killed and a security
guard wounded. The five- storey building, which stands across the street
from a Jewish-owned Italian restaurant, was badly damaged.
A police officer outside the Jewish
centre told Reuters at the scene that the attack there was "apparently
carried out by suicide bombers who were wearing explosives around their
belts". He had no information on casualties.
The single-storey building was badly
damaged, with blood stains visible on the facade up to five metres high.
Broken glass, bricks and rubble littered the street.
In Madrid, a Spanish diplomat quoted
colleagues in Morocco as saying that three people with explosives entered
the Spanish restaurant. Spain was a vocal supporter of the US war on Iraq
and has had fraught relations with Morocco, where Madrid once exercised
colonial powers.
Spanish diplomats said one of the
explosions had hit either the office or residence of the US consul, which
lies close to the Belgian mission. In Washington, a State Department spokesman
said no US government facility was hit.
Casablanca, Morocco's biggest city
with a population of 3 million, lies on the Atlantic coast about 60 miles
(95 km) southwest of the capital Rabat.
In February, Morocco jailed three
Saudis for 10 years for taking part in what the court found was an Al Qaeda
plot to attack US and British warships in the Gibraltar Strait.
In August last year, the authorities
-- who keep tight control over Islamist activity in the kingdom -- arrested
30 radical Islamists for allegedly killing several Moroccans.
Al Qaeda claimed responsibility
for a truck bomb attack on a synagogue in another North African country,
Tunisia, in April last year in which 20 people -- including 14 German tourists
-- were killed. Neighbouring Algeria has been riven by Islamist violence
against the government for over a decade.