Morocco, Britain arrest 70 in 2 terror plots

LONDON — Police in England have arrested 14 people in anti-terrorism raids, saying Saturday they suspected the men were involved in training and recruiting for terror.

The arrests in London late Friday and early Saturday were not linked to the alleged plot to bomb trans-Atlantic airliners or to the July 2005 bomb attacks on London's transport network, the capital's Metropolitan Police said.

Meanwhile, Moroccan police have arrested 56 suspected members of a terrorist network as part of a monthlong anti-terror sweep, the country's official news agency reported.

The suspects, associated with a Muslim group calling itself Ansar al-Mahdi, are accused of plotting terrorist attacks in the North African kingdom, the official MAP news agency said Thursday. Moroccan officials could not be reached for comment on Friday.

The group was planning to "announce a holy war in the mountains of North Morocco, attack sensitive targets, foreign interests and well-known Moroccans because they represent the state or for moral reasons," the news agency quoted the interior minister, Chakib Benmoussa, as saying.

Morocco, a moderate Islamic country, has been battling a radical Islamic movement that inspired deadly suicide bombings in Casablanca in 2003. The fundamentalist Islamic trend has continued to grow among the largely disenfranchised youths of Morocco's poorest quarters despite anti-terrorist crackdowns.

Benmoussa told a parliamentary commission last week that the Ansar al-Mahdi group had amassed "material to manufacture far more explosives" than those used during the 2003 bombings, according to a MAP report of the meeting.

Local news reports have also said that the group planned to kidnap Moroccan politicians, including at least two ministers and several legislators.

Four women were among those arrested, including the wives of two pilots for the national airline, Royal Air Maroc, according to Benmoussa. One of the women had had contacts with the wife of a slain member of al-Qaida from Morocco who was accused of helping plan the 2005 Madrid train bombings, the ministry said.