Casablanca, 26 April (AKI) - Moroccan police believe a suspected mastermind of the deadly May 2003 Casablanca bombings who they arrested last month - 44-year-old Moroccan national Saad Hussaini - is the brain behind a terrorist cell allegedly responsible for the recent wave of suicide bombings in Casablanca and the head of a jihadist network that has been sending would-be suicide bombers to Iraq, Spanish daily ABC reports. It was Hussaini's arrest on 8 March that sparked a series of seven suicide bombings in Casablanca between 11 March and 13 April, ABC said, quoting police sources. Police believe Hussaini recruited the suicide bombers and trained them in the use of explosives and weapons. At the time of his arrest, Hussaini was identified by the official Moroccan news agency MAP as the military leader of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain, or GICM), an Islamic fundamentalist group operating in North Africa.
Hussaini's activities signal the existence of an extensive terror network stretching from North Africa to Spain and the Middle East, say Moroccan investigators. He studied chemisty at the University of Valencia in the 1990s when police arrested him for having falsified documents for Islamist extremists. Hussaini in 1997 escaped to Afghanistan where he was in contact with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri, according to ABC.
He returned in 2002 to Morocco and assumed a prominent role in the GICM and was one of the main organisers of the 16 May 2003 bombings of Casablanca tourist locations which killed 33 civilians and the 12 bombers and injured over 100 civilians - the deadliest attacks in the country's history.
Investigators are trying to establish whether Hussaini was in Spain on 11 March 2004 - the date of the Madrid train bombings which killed 191 commuters and injured 1,800 over which 29 mainly North African suspects are currently standing trial in the Spanish capital. Moroccan sources quoted by ABC allege Hussaini was in contact with the Madrid train bombing cell and analysis of DNA evidence is reported to be key to the investigation. Hussaini has been detained in Sale near the Moroccan city of Rabat since 8 March.