Morocco Remembers: 18 Years Since Deadly Casablanca Terror Attacks

That day, Morocco was still celebrating the birth of Crown Prince Moulay Hassan, when fourteen suicide bombers from the infamous Sidi Moumen neighborhood decided to carry out five suicide attacks, killing 45 people and injuring more than 100 in Casablanca.

The security authorities of the Kingdom had then carried out a series of arrests and questioned 1,048 suspects belonging to Islamist movements in just three months. 634 of them had been prosecuted for their alleged involvement in the terrorist attacks of May 16, 2003.

Since then, the Moroccan exception so praised by the official literature has been strongly discredited. On March 11, 2007, Abdelfettah Raydi, 24, from the Thomas slum in Sidi Moumen, blew himself up in an Internet cafe in his neighborhood, injuring four people.

A month later, four suicide bombers carried out a suicide attack in Hay Al Farah, Casablanca. The toll: 5 dead, one policeman and the 4 suicide bombers, and 19 injured. On April 14, two brothers blew themselves up two meters from the main entrance of the U.S. Consulate, on Boulevard Moulay Youssef in Casablanca.

Officially, no less than 50 terrorist cells have been dismantled in Morocco between 2003 and 2008, before the Kingdom was again shaken by a terrorist attack on April 28, 2011 at the Argana cafe, on Jamaa El Fna square in Marrakech, killing 17 people and injuring 21, many of them foreigners.

Morocco was also shaken in December 2018 by the murder of two Scandinavian tourists in the Imlil region. The terrorist trail, initially ruled out by the authorities, was finally acknowledged by the security services.