RABAT, 23 June 2003 — A Moroccan prosecutor has ordered an investigation into eight Moroccan nationals, three of them journalists, for allegedly helping extremists with links to the Al-Qaeda network to plan attacks.
The chief suspect, Zakaria Boughrara, “was receiving funds from foreign parties belonging to the movement known as Assalafi Al Jihadi, which is linked to the Al-Qaeda organization,” the Rabat prosecutor, quoted by Morocco’s official MAP news agency, said Saturday.
Boughrara, 33, alias Abousayf al Islam, was arrested in the eastern city of Oujda. Several members of his family were also placed under investigation for helping him to channel funds from abroad, the Moroccan capital’s prosecutor said in a statement.
He said the funds, whose amount was unspecified, were meant to “finance militants from the fundamentalist organization, Salafia Jihadia in Morocco, in order to carry out terror attacks.”
Salafia Jihadia is one of two Moroccan extremist groups accused of involvement in a series of suicide bomb attacks that killed 43 people in Morocco’s biggest city Casablanca on May 16.
The three journalists also placed under investigation were accused of publishing articles in local Oudja papers in which Boughrara “calls for the people and the means to prepare” to carry out suicide attacks, the prosecutor said.
