Mauritania investigates al Qaeda link in killings

NOUAKCHOTT, Dec 26 (Reuters) - Mauritania suspects that Islamic extremists allied to al Qaeda were among the killers of four French tourists gunned down when they stopped for a Christmas Eve picnic, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

After initially citing robbery as the motive for Monday's attack outside Aleg, 250 km (160 miles) southeast of the capital Nouakchott, investigators said they were hunting three killers, two of whom were suspected members of Islamic militant groups.

They viewed the attack as potentially a high-profile strike by Islamist extremists aimed at Europeans at Christmas, and carried out 12 days before the January start of the Lisbon-Dakar rally that will cross Mauritania.

Three turbanned gunmen fired on the picnicking French with automatic weapons at a roadside halt on Monday, killing four of them outright and wounding a fifth.

The 73-year-old survivor was shot in the leg and flown for treatment to Senegal, from where he was to be evacuated to France. His two adults sons, his brother and a family friend were killed.

Police said the three suspected killers fled southwards to Bogue, a town on Mauritania's southern Senegal River border with neighbouring Senegal. Mauritanian and Senegalese security forces were searching both sides of the frontier.

Mauritania's prosecution service said in a statement two of the men being sought were "young Mauritanians suspected of belonging to extremist Salafist groups".

This reference pointed to an Algeria-based Islamic militant group formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which is accused of attacks in North Africa.

The GSPC has changed its name to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb after allying itself to mainstream al Qaeda. In September, al Qaeda's second in command urged north African Muslims to "cleanse" their land of Spaniards and French.

Monday's killings have shocked the former French colony that straddles Arab and black Africa on the western fringe of the Sahara. Authorities have been trying to develop a desert tourism industry in the thinly populated, largely desert country.

Prosecutors said five people had been arrested so far in the investigation, including one man who had previously been convicted and served a jail sentence in Mauritania for belonging to a "terrorist group".

He was suspected of having organised the cars used by the killers to carry out Monday's attack and to flee the scene.

Mauritania is generally peaceful, but past governments, fearing the kind of al Qaeda-linked terrorist attacks which have hit neighbours Morocco and Algeria in recent years, have carried out several roundups and trials of suspected Islamic extremists. (Writing by Pascal Fletcher)