A senior US official warned that thousands of al-Qaeda activists are still at large and preparing more attacks, as police raids around the world netted several dozen suspects yesterday.
”We have had good evidence that there are literally thousands of al-Qaeda trainees around,” Porter Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC television. ”And there is good reason to believe that some of those people are in the United States of America.”
US Democrats said last week’s attacks in Morocco and Saudi Arabia showed that George Bush had overstated claims of success in the war against terrorism.
”Al-Qaeda never went out of business,” Senator John Kerry, a Democratic presidential candidate, said on CBS television.
”What’s happened is we broke the beehive, but we didn’t kill the bees and we certainly haven’t killed the queen bee,” he said.
In Morocco, police raided shanty towns around Casablanca and detained up to 30 people in other cities as authorities speculated that the 13 suicide bombers who killed 28 other people on Friday night belonged to groups led by al-Qaeda veterans who had been in Afghanistan.
Morocco’s justice minister, Mohamed Bouzoubaa, said a 14th suicide bomber, who ran away from the attack on a hotel, had helped to identify eight colleagues, some of them Moroccans living abroad. The minister suggested these men were linked to a group calling itself Assirat al Moustaquim (Direct Path).
Assirat al Moustaquim is believed to be a splinter group of another radical Islamist organisation, Salafist Jihad.
One of Salafist Jihad’s main spiritual leaders, 28-year-old Ould Mohammed Abdelwahab Raqiqi, alias Abu Hafs, was jailed this year for inciting violence against westerners.
The Morocco bombs were a coordinated attack against five tourist and Jewish targets. They were the Casa de Espana, a private club; the Israeli Alliance club; a business hotel; the Belgian consulate; and a Jewish cemetery.
In Saudi Arabia, authorities said they had detained four suspected al-Qaida members who had prior knowledge of last week’s suicide bombings in Riyadh that killed at least 34 people. The authorities said they had identified a further 19 members of the al-Qaeda group involved in the bombing.
Spain toughened frontier controls in the south as a result of the Casablanca bombing, where the worst carnage was wreaked at the Casa de Espana, in a sign that the country, which backed war in Iraq, had joined a global hate list for violent Islamist radicals.
Germany’s foreign ministry urged against travel to East Africa and Morocco, and German intelligence services were reported as saying they also feared new terror attacks in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
Israeli national carrier El Al Airlines said it had suspended flights to Nairobi, becoming the second airline to stop its service to Kenya after terrorist threats against US and British interests. – Guardian Unlimited Â