Morocco Jails Twin Girls for Plotting to Assassinate King

Two 14-year-old twin Moroccan girls accused of plotting to assassinate King Mohammed VI were yesterday sentenced to prison terms as part of a massive crackdown on Islamists.

Iman and Sanaa Laghrisse were given five-year sentences at the end of a trial which heard they had been contemplating an attack on "the person of the king and the royal family".

The twins were also accused of planning a joint suicide attack on a supermarket in the capital Rabat that sold alcohol and to bomb the Moroccan parliament. It was unclear last night on which charges the court had declared them guilty.

The girls had been turned over to the police by a local imam in Rabat to whom they had gone to get a blessing for the planned attacks.

A defence lawyer, Saad Gennou, said the twins had admitted to planning suicide attacks. Their mother, Rachida Triae, blamed one of the 18 men accused alongside them of recruiting them into an extremist cell.

Moroccans, still reeling from the suicide bomb attacks that killed 45 people in Casablanca in May, have been shocked that girls so young could be involved with an Islamist terror network.

Local newspapers have reported that they come from a poverty-stricken, broken family, have little or no formal education and may have worked as prostitutes.

A Rabat court last week handed down two death sentences to Islamists accused of preparing acts of terrorism.

That brought to 16 the number of death sentences handed down since May, with 40 others getting life sentences after police arrested more than 900 suspected Islamists.

Morocco's leading human rights group yesterday complained that the mass trials, with some of the accused given only 15 minutes to testify and where acquittals have been rare, have been seriously flawed. "The trials have not been equitable and fair," said Mohammed el-Boukili of the Moroccan Human Rights Association.

Mr Boukili said few witnesses had been called, prosecutors had relied heavily on summaries of defendants' statements under interrogation and judges had been forced to deal with groups of up to 50 defendants at a time.

Abdellatif Merroun, a Moroccan who obtained British nationality after marrying a British woman, last week received a five-year term in Casablanca for alleged collaboration with violent Islamists.

His wife Fatima said all her husband had done was act as an informal interpreter at Heathrow once for a Moroccan Islamist preacher, who was later jailed in connection with the Casablanca bombings.