MONTREAL — A Jewish woman who grew up and married in Montreal and her Moroccan-born husband were among the victims in the April 28 terror bombing of a café in Marrakech, Morocco, that reportedly killed at least 16 people.
Twenty-eight-year-old Michal Zekry-Wizman, who was five months pregnant with a second child, and her husband, Messod Wizman, 30, were in a café waiting for their nearby hotel room to be readied when the attack, reportedly linked to Al Qaeda, occurred.
The couple was in Morocco to visit Messod’s family, who were taking care of the couple’s two-year-old son, David, in Casablanca, at the time of the attack.
Zekry-Wizman and her husband had moved to Shanghai, China, four years ago after their marriage in Montreal. Last Friday, Michal’s parents, Jacques and Simone Zekry, were preparing to depart Montreal for the couple’s May 2 burial in Israel, Michal’s birthplace. The Zekry family had moved from Israel to Montreal when Michal was a child.
According to a friend who spoke with The CJN, Zekry-Wizman attended École Maïmonide and graduated from the Université de Montréal.
Rabbi Shalom Greenberg, the Chabad rabbi in Shanghai, was quoted as being shocked at the murders and described the couple as, “special people, generous, with pure souls.”
Evidence collected from the explosion last Thursday in the Moroccan city confirmed it was a bomb attack, the country’s interior ministry said.
“Analysis of the early evidence collected at the site of the blast that occurred on Thursday at a cafe in Marrakech confirms the theory of an attack,” the ministry said in a statement carried by the country’s official MAP news agency.
The blast ripped through the second story of the Cafe Argana, which overlooks Marrakech’s Jamaa el-Fnaa square, a spot usually bustling with tourists and local vendors.
Officials didn’t say if they suspected the involvement of Islamist terror groups. The groups’ last major attacks came in a series of suicide bombings in Morocco’s commercial capital, Casablanca, in 2003, that killed more than 45 people.
Two people in Marrakech told Reuters the explosion was the work of a suicide bomber, but there was no immediate confirmation of this.
“I heard a massive blast. The first and second floors of the building were destroyed,” said one local woman, who didn’t want to be identified. “Some witnesses said they have seen a man carrying a bag entering the cafe before the blast occurred.”
The roof over the restaurant’s upstairs terrace was ripped off by the force of the explosion, and pieces of plaster and electrical wires hung from the ceiling.
The interior ministry issued a statement saying the explosion killed 14 people, including an undisclosed number of foreigners, and injured another 20 people.
Moroccan TV later issued a statement saying that 10 of those killed in the explosion were foreigners, six of whom were French.
The blast is likely to hurt Morocco’s tourism trade – a major source of revenue – which is already struggling to recover from the effects of the global downturn.
“Marrakech is the main tourist destination in Morocco, and Argana Cafe has been one of the most popular cafes in the square,” said a Frenchman who owns a restaurant in the city.
With files from Ha’aretz