From local gang in Morocco to suicide bombers?

12.00pm

RABAT - A Moroccan Islamist group suspected of links with 13 suicide bombers who killed 28 people in Casablanca had until now been regarded as little more than a neighbourhood gang.

The Assirat al Moustaquim group hit local headlines in February 2002, when some of its members stoned to death a man in the low-income Casablanca neighbourhood of Sidi Moumen.

Moroccan Justice Minister Mohamed Bouzoubaa suggested on Sunday this group may have helped with the Casablanca suicide bombings on Friday night.

Worshipping in makeshift mosques, the group's members sought to impose strict Islamic law on Sidi Moumen, harassing women as well as mixed-sex couples seen in public.

The man stoned to death, Fouad al Kardoudi, had attracted the hostility of a dozen local young men and had had earlier confrontations with them.

The killing prompted indignation among Moroccan liberals. By late April Zakaria Miloudi, 37, said to be the group's leader, was under arrest.

He and 13 others went on trial in Casablanca and in January one of the group, Adil Bachar, was sentenced to 20 years in jail for the Sidi Moumen killing. Others received shorter sentences.

Miloudi himself was sentenced to one year after the court found he had ordered the killing in a fatwa (edict).

Members of such small grassroots groups, presented in the Moroccan media as part of a Taleban-influenced Salafist Jihad movement, have declared their ideological support for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Some of them are returnees from the Afghan Jihad -- the holy struggle first against the Russian invader and then to establish a strict Islamic state under the now ousted Taleban.

Information given to the Moroccan public about such groups has been piecemeal and often confusing.

Last July then-Islamic Affairs Minister Abdelkbir Mdaghri Alaoui said that even the most conservative of Moroccan Islamists "refuse violence and terrorism".

However, in the weeks leading up to the September general election in which Islamists of the Justice and Development Party (PJD) surged to become the third largest party in parliament, the Jihad Salafists were portrayed as a threat to stability.

The PJD condemned the Casablanca bombings.

With the election over, media interest in them abated. But Afghanistan returnees continued to be picked up by the security services and held without trial.

A Casablanca court in February handed down relatively light sentences, of 10 years each, to three Saudi members of al Qaeda said to have planned attacks on US and British warships in the Strait of Gibraltar. No link was established during the trial with any grassroots group such as Assirat al Moustaquim.

Earlier this month, the new Islamic Affairs Minister Ahmed Toufiq warned in a press interview against exaggerating the importance of the country's Salafists.

Moroccan authorities have always insisted that the Moroccan tradition of Islamic observance is tolerant and immune to fanaticism.

But in deprived areas like Sidi Moumen or shanty-towns on the outskirts of Rabat, Fes, or Tangiers, literalist intepretation of Islam, which the authorities dismiss as a foreign import, has gained adherents in recent years.

- REUTERS