Morocco arrests Islamists after bombings kill 41

3.00pm

UPDATE - Radical Islamists were the prime suspects today for suicide bomb attacks in Morocco which killed 41 people and prompted fresh warnings from President Bush that al Qaeda remained a threat.

In a series of raids, Moroccan police arrested 33 suspects, including some linked to the radical Djihad Salafist group, a senior government official said.

One of the group's main spiritual leaders was jailed earlier this month for inciting violence.

Moroccan Interior Minister Al Mustapha Sahel said the investigation "points to a group that has been arrested recently," an apparent reference to Djihad Salafist.

The minister told state-run on 2M television that police had identified the bodies of seven of the 14-strong cell believed to have carried out the five almost simultaneous attacks Friday night.

Thirteen assailants perished, another was critically-ill.

The attacks, the first in Morocco since two Spanish tourists were gunned down in a Marrakech hotel in 1995, left around 100 people wounded and shattered Morocco's image as a relatively stable country and safe tourist destination.

A Jewish community center, a Jewish-owned restaurant and a Spanish club were among the targets in Friday's night of death and destruction in a city immortalized in the 1942 romantic Hollywood film Casablanca.

Three French nationals, two Spaniards and an Italian were reported killed in the second major attack within a week on an Arab kingdom with historically close ties to the United States. Saudi Arabia was hit by multiple suicide bombings Monday.

Bush said the attacks in Casablanca and the Saudi capital Riyadh "demonstrate that the war against terror goes on," and offered Morocco US support to track down the perpetrators.

In the Moroccan capital Rabat, security was heavy around Western embassies but remained at levels imposed after the start of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had warned that the Iraq conflict -- opposed by most Muslim and Arab states -- would create "one hundred new bin Ladens."

The al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden is blamed for the September 11 attacks on US cities in 2001 and US officials said a link between al Qaeda and the Morocco attacks was plausible.

Morocco and Saudi Arabia, bin Laden's birthplace, were among Muslim states listed as "most eligible for liberation" in a tape purportedly by the al Qaeda leader and broadcast in February.

Millions of young migrants from rural poverty struggle to make their way in Casablanca's teeming suburbs that have become recruiting grounds for radical Islamic militants. Casablanca, situated on the Atlantic coast about 60 miles southwest of Rabat, has one of the world's biggest mosques.

Last year the security forces arrested a group suspected of plotting al Qaeda attacks on US and British targets in the Gibraltar strait and Morocco's tourist capital Marrakesh.

Earlier this month, a Moroccan court sentenced one of the main spiritual figures of Djihad Salafist, Ould Mohammed Abdelwahab Raqiqi, alias Abu Hafs, to six months in jail for inciting violence.

The 28-year-old cleric, who was among Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, has voiced clear support for the September 11 attacks in 2001 on US cities and hailed Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden as a hero.

Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, is the only person charged in the United States in connection with the September 11 attacks on US cities.

- REUTERS