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Morocco foils 'major attack'
25/08/2006 09:22 - (SA)
Rabat - A militant Islamist cell broken up by Moroccan security forces was equipped to carry out a far bigger attack than the bombings in Casablanca in May 2003, which killed 45 people, the country's interior minister said.
The government said on August 7 it had broken up a "terrorist
network" that was planning to declare a holy war in the
northeast of the country and had recruited five members of the
armed forces able to handle explosives.
The authorities arrested over 40 members of the previously
unknown Jammaat Ansar El Mehdi (El Mehdi Support Group) and
seized explosives, propaganda material and laboratory equipment.
Attacks on tourist, other sites
Interior minister Chakib Benmoussa said the group had
created a paramilitary branch which chose mountainous areas in
northern Morocco to train its followers for a holy war and
obtain arms with the help of local drug barons.
"The group aimed to attack tourist installations, sensitive
sites and foreign services ... and planned to assassinate people
symbolising the state or for moral reasons," Benmoussa told
members of parliament on Thursday.
He said the group had managed to get hold of large amounts
of materials for making explosives, far more than the quantity
used in the Casablanca bombings in May 2003.
Military personnel
The fact that the latest cell to be broken up contained
military personnel set alarm bells ringing in the kingdom, whose
late king twice came close to assassination in the 1970s in
attempted coups by military officers.
Benmoussa played down the idea that Islamist extremists had
infiltrated the military, saying the members of the armed forces
involved with Jemmaa Ansar El Mehdi were marginal individuals -
soldiers belonging to military bands and sports centres or
vehicle maintenance personnel.
Links to al-Qaeda
Earlier this year, the government said it had broken up more
than 50 terrorist cells with more than 2 000 members since the
Casablanca attacks.
Benmoussa said one of those groups, discovered in November
last year, had links with al-Qaeda and wanted to set up a
terrorist network across the Maghreb.
Members of another group broken up at the start of 2006 had
trained in camps in Mali and were linked to the Algeria-based
Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), he said.
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