AT LEAST 20 people were killed and 60 injured as four explosions rocked the Moroccan city of Casablanca last night in what appeared to be a co-ordinated attack on a Jewish centre and tourist targets.

Mostafa Sahel, the Moroccan Interior Minister, said that the attacks “bear the hallmarks of international terrorism”, suggesting that al-Qaeda was responsible.

Witnesses said that several people had been killed in a blast at the Israelite Alliance Circle. Three more blasts were also reported in districts frequented by locals and tourists.

Witnesses said that the bombings were suicide attacks and there were reports that the bodies of two bombers were pulled out of the rubble of the Jewish centre, which is next to a synagogue.

The official Moroccan news agency, MAP, said that the explosions hit Morocco’s economic capital at 10pm local time. In three cases, cars had been packed with explosives, while the fourth was a bomb blast.

At least one explosion was heard in the Ain Diab district, a home to restaurants, clubs and hotels. The Safir and Salah hotels were among the targets, along with a Spanish club, the Casa de España, according to initial reports. Witnesses said that the Belgian consulate had also been damaged.

Three of the blasts were car bombs. “There are body parts all over the place,” a Moroccan journalist told the BBC.

Journalists at the scene said that eight people were believed dead at one of the hotels and that the car bomb at the Belgian consulate may have been aimed at a nearby Jewish restaurant.

The city is home to about 5,000 Jews, the remnants of a once-thriving Jewish community that numbered 270,000 after the war. The majority have emigrated to Israel and France.

The blasts came four days after the suicide bombings in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital, in which 34 people were killed, and amid fresh warnings from Britain and the United States that al-Qaeda was planning a new wave of attacks against Western tourists.

In March the Foreign Office warned Britons travelling to Morocco that the threat of terrorism had increased.

British intelligence chiefs also warned Tony Blair yesterday that British holidaymakers faced a terrorist attack at any tourist spot in Kenya. The Foreign Offfice later said that there was a clear terrorist threat in six other East African countries: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda.

The Casablanca death toll could rise further, with numerous people injured. No Britons were known to be among the casualties. Ambulances were brought in from surrounding towns to transfer the injured to hospital. Police set up roadblocks around the city and the authorities said that they had arrested three people.

One witness, Aboubakr Jammal, told the BBC: “We don’t have experience of bombs. It is very quiet because people fled to their homes. People were calling each other to come back home.”

Morocco has not been targeted by terrorists since an attack in Marrakesh in 1994, but the country has been described as a target by al-Qaeda because of its willingness to co-operate with the US in the War on Terror. However, the Moroccan authorities had managed to contain Islamic terrorism there until now.

In June last year the Moroccan police broke up an al- Qaeda cell that was planning to attack western ships off Gibraltar. In February three Saudi Arabian members of an al-Qaeda cell were found to have plotted attacks on Royal Navy and US Navy ships and were jailed for ten years by a Casablanca court. They had planned to sail a rubber speedboat laden with explosives into the Straits of Gibraltar a year ago.

Security services have been investigating links between Moroccan Islamic extremists and the al-Qaeda terror network since the September 11 attacks on America.

The “20th hijacker”, Zacarias Moussaoui, currently on trial in the United States for his alleged part in the September 11 attacks, is a French Moroccan. Moussaoui, 34, is believed to have been recruited by the hijackers while living in Brixton, South London. He was taking flying lessons in America when he was arrested three weeks before the September 11 strikes. He is the only person charged in the US in connection with the attacks. He faces the death penalty if convicted.

Last night’s events in Casablanca also bore close resemblance to the attack in April last year in neighbouring Tunisia, in which people, including Germans, were killed in an explosion at the Ghriba synagogue on Djerba, a resort island that is a hub for Tunisia’s small Jewish community. A lorry laden with gas blew up at the wall of the 2,000-year-old synagogue, the oldest in Africa.The blast was originally deemed a “tragic accident” but several al-Qaeda figures later claimed responsibility.

Last June the man considered to be Osama bin Laden’s official spokesman made a tape recording claiming that al-Qaeda had carried out the attack.

On the Kenya alert, Mr Blair has been told that, while Africa’s most-wanted terrorist, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, was planning to attack a British aircraft, his al-Qaeda cell was just as likely to strike at an hotel or anywhere that Britons congregate. There are now an estimated 1,700 British tourists in Kenya.

Chris Murungaru, the Kenyan National Security Minister, said that Osama bin Laden’s network had made a specific threat against British Airways flights to Nairobi. It was this that led the British authorities on Thursday immediately to suspend all flights in and out.

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