A Moroccan court has sentenced four men to death in connection with suicide bombings in Casablanca three months ago.
The judges found the four guilty of premeditated murder in the five simultaneous attacks on May 16th in which 45 people were killed, including 12 suicide bombers.
Two of those sentenced to death, Mohamed Omari and Rachid Jalil, were among the 14-member suicide team - but who survived.
The four were among 87 defendants the public prosecutor at the trial accused of belonging to a shadowy, ultra-conservative Islamist movement called the Salafist Jihad. The group advocates violence against US interests and Jews in Morocco and against Muslim Moroccans it finds insufficiently observant.
Of the other defendants facing various charges including criminal conspiracy and undermining the security of the state, 39 received life sentences, 15 sentences of 30 years and 15 of 20 years, nine of 10 years, two of eight years, one of six years, and two of 10 months.
In a pause after the sentences were announced, most of the defendants started shouting "Allahu Akbar" [God is Greatest], with some standing on benches within their glassed-in enclosure in the courtroom waving their fists in the air.
Many of the defendants protested their innocence and said they were patriotic citizens opposed to violence. But the public prosecutor had argued in court they were are all adherents of the Salafist Jihad.
Prosecutors said some of the defendants had been primed to carry out subsequent attacks at places frequented by tourists in the towns of Marrakesh, Agadir and Essaouira, as part of a violent Jihad, or holy struggle, against Western, Jewish and US interests.
Morocco has only carried out the death sentence once in the last 20 years, when a police commissioner was executed in 1993 for rape and sexual violence offences over three years.