The interior minister, Mostafa Sahel, told reporters overnight in Casablanca that the attacks "bear the hallmark of international terrorism." Mr. Sahel said 10 suicide bombers were also killed. He added that 60 other people had been injured. 

The attacks, scattered across several parts of the city, appeared to have been coordinated, and they came at a time when American officials and others were expressing increasing concern about the prospect of a new wave of terrorism. They followed the car-bomb attacks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Monday night, that killed 34 people, 8 of them Americans. 

Reports from Casablanca, the Atlantic Ocean port city that is Morocco's commercial capital, described scenes of carnage near a Spanish cultural center, the Belgian Consulate, a Jewish community center and the Farah Maghreb Hotel, formerly known as the Hotel Safir, where the bombs began to explode about 9:20 p.m. local time.

"There are body parts all over the place," a Moroccan journalist told the BBC, describing an eyewitness account from the Spanish cultural center.

Those who died included two Moroccan police officers and a security guard at the Spanish cultural center, according to the official Map news agency. The Moroccan agency said three suspects had been arrested, but it gave no immediate details. It said King Mohammed VI was being kept informed and had "ordered a system for evacuating the injured to be put in place."

Witnesses told Agence France-Presse that most of the casualties had occurred at the Jewish Alliance Club. The French news agency reported that a suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance of the Farah Maghreb Hotel when a hotel porter would not let him in. The French agency said two suicide bombers' bodies had been recovered from ruins at the Jewish center.

The Belgian Consulate is near the United States Consulate, but American officials in Washington said that it had not been a target.

A State Department spokeswoman, Joanne Moore, said no United States government building had been hit. A duty officer at the Pentagon said there was no indication that the attacks had been aimed at the United States military. 

American officials had spoken for several days of growing but inconclusive indications picked up through intelligence channels that a terrorist attack might be imminent. 

The officials had said their concerns focused on the Middle East, East Africa and Asia, and they had gone so far as to issue warnings about Kenya, Malaysia and a specific neighborhood in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. But they had not issued any specific warnings about Morocco.

Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization seen as the most likely culprit in the Saudi blasts, has made a specialty of staging coordinated, near-simultaneous attacks, like the bombings in 1998 of American embassies in East Africa and the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

In May and June last year, Morocco arrested three Saudis and seven Moroccans suspected of having links to Al Qaeda. The suspects were accused of plotting to attack American and British warships crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, and of planning attacks on tourist sites in Morocco.
 

The Moroccan authorities have tried to keep a tight lid on the activities of militants within the kingdom. In August of last year, they arrested 30 Muslim radicals and charged them with the killing of several Moroccans. According to the Moroccan news agency, three of the blasts were car bombs, which struck the Belgian Consulate, the Jewish center and the Farah Maghreb Hotel, located in the heart of the city in an area crowded with hotels and restaurants.  The fourth explosion, near the Spanish cultural center, was apparently caused by a bomb that was not in a car, the news agency said. Moroccan journalists quoted by Reuters said the blast at the hotel, which they said had killed at least eight people, may have been aimed at a nearby Jewish restaurant.

Radical Muslim groups have condemned the Moroccan government for its close cooperation with Washington's campaign against terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. Some of the Qaeda and Taliban members captured by United States forces in Afghanistan are known to have been turned over to Moroccan authorities for questioning.

A largely moderate Muslim country in North Africa, Morocco was one of the first countries in the Arab world to establish relations with Israel. It is home to a significant Jewish community that numbers several thousand people. 

The United States and Morocco are expected to sign a free-trade agreement by the end of 2003, and Moroccan leaders have pointed to the deal as a reason for companies to base their Middle East operations in the country.

In addition to the new terror warnings from the United States in the last few days concerning Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia, the British government on Thursday ordered a halt to airline flights to and from Kenya, and the Kenyan government said today that there had been a specific Qaeda threat to British Airways planes flying into Nairobi. 

Britain later warned its citizens of a "clear terrorist threat" in six neighboring East African countries.

Today, President Bush told reporters that the attacks in Saudi Arabia had served notice to the world that there were killers on the loose.

"It's dangerous in the world, and it's dangerous inside Saudi Arabia, and it's dangerous so long as Al Qaeda continues to operate," Mr. Bush said.