From
Reuters
RABAT (Reuters) - Morocco's security services broke up a terrorist network planning to declare a holy war in the northeast of the North African country, state news agency MAP reported on Monday.
The authorities arrested 44 members of the previously unknown Jammaat Ansar El Mehdi (El Mehdi Support Group) and seized explosives, propaganda material and laboratory equipment, the agency quoted an Interior Ministry statement as saying.
The group's leader "aimed to proclaim the jihad", or holy war, it said. It did not say where the arrests, the biggest such round-up this year, took place but added that the group planned to operate in the kingdom's northeast.
Morocco has been on alert since 2003 when suicide bombers killed 45 people in Casablanca, the country's financial capital.
The Moroccan government said earlier this year it had busted more than 50 terrorist cells with more than 2,000 members since the bombings, a traumatic event in a normally peaceful country that relies on tourism for much of its hard currency earnings.
The government blamed the Casablanca attacks on Islamists who had brainwashed bored, impressionable youngsters in the slums that surround the sprawling coastal city.
Of the latest arrests, MAP said: "The security services dismantled a terrorist network that planned to commit criminal acts on national territory."
The group's head "managed to recruit radical Islamists with a view to training them to use explosives in the regions of Nador and Ouezzane, from where he aimed to proclaim the jihad, after buying firearms," MAP said.
The group aimed to fund the jihad by robbing banks and money transport convoys and with personal loans taken out by group members.
In May, police arrested hundreds of members of the country's fundamentalist Islamist opposition in several cities following reports that opposition supporters were plotting an uprising this year.
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