A Moroccan court has handed a newspaper editor a one-year suspended prison sentence for publishing a claim of responsibility for suicide bombings in Casablanca in May that killed 44 people.
The official MAP news agency said today Mr Mustapha Alaoui, editor of the tabloid weekly Al Ousboue, was sentenced last night under a new anti-terrorism law making it an offence not to give the police information related to terrorism.
Separately, it said a Casablanca court sentenced to death 10 alleged members of an Islamic militant group suspected of links to the attacks.
The defendants had been arrested before the bombings and accused of various charges including the murder of several Moroccans they deemed to have violated strict Islamic standards.
The government has blamed the blasts, in which 12 suicide bombers died, on Islamic militants within the Salafist Jihad tendency accused of indirect links to al Qaeda. The trial of the blasts suspects is to begin on July 21st.
The 10 men sentenced to death were among 31 members on trial of the Salafist Jihad group, including its leader Yussef Fikri, who had been arrested weeks ahead of the Casablanca attacks. Eight of them were sentenced to life in prison.
The sentenced journalist, Mr Alaoui, had been arrested at around the same time as three reporters from the northern city of Oujda who had published interviews and comments from radical Islamist sympathisers. Two of them have since been released.
The Rabat court last night also banned the weekly for three months, MAP said. Al Ousbouehad published a handwritten note from an unknown group calling itself As Saiqa (Lightning) claming responsibility for the May 16th attacks.
Prosecutors argued he should have passed the note to police.