RABAT, MOROCCO — They are politicians and businessmen, bureaucrats and pharmacists, a police commander and a TV journalist.
Police arrested them and seized an arsenal in nationwide raids this month, the biggest crackdown in Morocco since suicide bombings killed 45 people, including the 12 bombers, in Casablanca five years ago.
During the last week, Moroccans have clustered on rainy mornings around kiosks along this capital's colonnaded downtown avenues, marveling at the latest newspaper reports on the case. The profile of the 35 suspects contrasts sharply with the Casablanca bombers, a dozen young men from a slum who assembled homemade explosives and died wearing identical wristwatches that were a last gift from their handler.
The recently arrested alleged leader of the group was a well-off Moroccan immigrant in Belgium who is accused of financing his activity with multimillion-dollar hold-ups and committing assassinations in that European country dating back 20 years. Moroccan Interior Minister Chakib Benmoussa said in an interview that the group plotted to assassinate Cabinet ministers, military chiefs and Jewish leaders to destabilize this moderate Muslim nation.
Benmoussa and other investigators say the alleged plot helps illustrate threats converging here. Morocco finds itself in the eye of a storm radiating across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
"The leaders of this network had the opportunity to train in Afghanistan, to meet leaders of Al Qaeda, and to go to Algeria to train in [rural outposts] in 2005," Benmoussa said.
Some aspects of the case against the suspects perplex analysts. The three politicians arrested belong to small parties that mix Islamist and leftist ideologies. Their defenders say they are moderates.
Their longtime ties to Shiite Muslim movements, including Hezbollah, may have been a factor in their arrests. Sunni Muslims are the majority here, but authorities worry about the danger of extremism among the small Shiite minority and sympathetic Sunni radicals.
Sunni and Western governments fear that the recent assassination of a Hezbollah military chief in Syria could foment Shiite-inspired violence around the world, says Abdellah Rami, an expert on Islam at the Moroccan Center for Social Studies.
But Rami sees contradictions in the official version alleging that the Moroccan group of suspects was influenced by both Sunni-led Al Qaeda and Shiite Hezbollah.
