CASABLANCA, Morocco, April 15 — The United States Consulate here said Sunday that it would close until further notice, a day after two brothers carried out puzzling suicide attacks near the consulate amid a spate of bombings in Morocco and Algeria. With the Moroccan police tightening security around the consulate and other foreign consulates here, the closing underscored American concerns expressed here and in Algeria about further attacks and possible dangers to Americans. On Saturday, United States officials here told their employees to stay home, warning that the potential for violence against Americans “remains high.” A similarly strong warning in Algeria prompted an official government protest that American officials were exaggerating the threat and stirring undue fear. “They take us for idiots,” Algeria’s interior minister, Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni, told reporters Sunday, according to Reuters. “Who has an interest in causing panic? It is clear that there is scheming.”
Some Moroccans, even if uneasy over violence in their largely stable nation, also expressed skepticism about the threat to Americans. On Wednesday, suicide bombings killed 33 people in Algiers, the capital of Algeria. The attacks, the first large bombings there in years, were aimed at the prime ministerÂ’s office and a police station, and were claimed by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
The day before in Casablanca, a port city and the commercial heart of this nation, which depends heavily on tourism, three men blew themselves up and a fourth was shot dead in a police raid on a safe house in the poor Hay Farah quarter. Then on Saturday, the rich downtown, filled with cafes, upscale shops and hotels charging as much for a night as many workers earn in a month, was hit. Mohammad Maha, 32, blew himself up across a palm-lined boulevard from the United States Consulate. About a minute later, his younger brother, Omar, 23, detonated a suicide bomb a few hundred yards away, near the American Language Center, one of a chain of privately owned schools. “People were really scared,” said a waiter, whose boss would not let him give his name, at the American Dream cafe between the locations of the two bombings on Boulevard Moulay Youssef. “People left their coffee and everyone just started running.”
The bombings on Saturday caused some measure of puzzlement: the attackers killed only themselves and struck early Saturday morning, when the streets were largely empty. Ahmed Najim, a reporter for the weekly newsmagazine Nichane who happened to be in the area when the bombs went off, said he believed that the two were actually aiming for a Moroccan security forces building nearby — and that something went wrong before they reached their target.
| Accidential explodulation, happens in Gaza all the time. Another workmanns comp claim for Mutual of Marrakesh. |