RABAT, Aug 7: Morocco’s security services on Monday broke up a terrorist network planning to declare a holy war in the northeast of the North African country. 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’, 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 country’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.—Reuters