Israel’s consul in Shanghai, Jackie Eldan, confirmed on Friday morning during a conversation with Voice of Israel radio that a Jewish couple from Shanghai was murdered in Thursday’s terror attack at a café in Marrakesh, Morocco.
The two are 30-year-old Israeli Michal Weitzmann Zikri and her 32-year-old husband Mas'oud Zikri, a native of Morocco. The two traveled to Morocco with their son to visit Mas'oud’s family. They left the baby with his grandmother and went to Marrakesh, where they lost their lives. Earlier it was reported that the woman was in the fourth month of pregnancy.
The attack occurred when a bomb tore through a tourist café in the heart of Marrakech’s old quarter Thursday, the Associated Press reported. According to the report, at least 14 people were killed in the blast, including 11 foreigners and three Moroccans.
At least 23 additional people were wounded in the blast, which AP reported occurred a few minutes before noon in Djemma el-Fna square, one of the top attractions in Morocco.
A spokesman for the Moroccan government, Khalid Naciri, told AP that while it was too soon to lay blame for the terrorist attack, Morocco regularly dismantles local terror cells linked to al-Qaeda.
Naciri noted, however, that “nothing led us to foresee an act of this magnitude. Morocco has an international image of welcome, hospitality and tourism. An act of this magnitude will leave its mark.”
It has been relatively quiet in Morocco since a series of five simultaneous terror attacks in the city of Casablanca in 2003 which killed 33 people.
One of the targets of those attacks was a kosher hotel restaurant, popular with Israelis, that was closed due to the Sabbath and was thus empty at the time of the attack.