LONDON - Moroccan police found a suspected suicide bombers' lair in Casablanca and Saudis grabbed a gunman at a US Consulate on Monday as a senior Washington official conceded there was no end in sight to the "war on terror".

　　After a week when suicide bombers killed dozens of Arabs and foreigners in the Saudi capital and Morocco, there was evidence Osama bin Laden's Islamists are regrouping - one expert said al Qaeda had a new military chief to replace the alleged mastermind of September 11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. "There's an al Qaedasgroupsstill actively plotting to kill," US President George W. Bush, promising vigilance.

　　Far beyond the original epicentre of Muslim suicide bombing, where Palestinians unleashed their fifth attack on Israelis in three days, the wider offensive on Western interests went on.

　　Egypt, an Arab friend that counselled Bush against war in Iraq for fear it would foster a "hundred new bin Ladens", said its prediction of an upsurge in violence had come true. Cairo's foreign minister Ahmed Maher called for more co-operation.

　　But Bush, who waged war on al Qaeda in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks 20 months ago and said overthrowing Saddam Hussein would help stabilize the entire Middle East, insisted his global campaign against terrorists was on track.

　　"I always said this was going to be a long war,' he told a news conference with President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines, which faces its own al Qaeda-linked insurgents.

　　"We're slowly but surely dismantling the al Qaeda operational network," he said. "But we've got a lot work to do."

　　The State Department's director of policy planning compared the war to an endemic virus that would break out every so often:

　　"This is a war that is not going to have any end for the foreseeable future," Richard Haass told the BBC.

　　New military chief

　　An expert on al Qaeda said an Egyptian who could take credit for keeping bin Laden alive after the Afghan war was al Qaeda's new military commander, following the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan nearly three months ago.

　　Rohan Gunaratna said, however, that Saif al-Adel had not been behind last week's attacks, saying they had been planned by Mohammed, the most senior al Qaeda leader seized by US allies.

　　Adel has a US million price on his head from the FBI. The United States had indicted him over the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He is believed, like bin Laden, to be hiding along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

　　Ministers from the big five European Union states met in Spain to discuss threats from across the Mediterranean. They want a long-term strategy to work with friendly Arab states.

　　Italy's interior minister warned that "dormant Islamic terrorism cells" could strike in Europe at any time.

　　But in what some analysts saw as evidence that tightened post-September 11 security measures had deterred a weakened al Qaeda from attacks in rich Western countries, last week's bombings rocked Arab monarchies with pro-Western rulers.

　　Moroccan police arrested a chemistry graduate after finding bomb-making materials in a suspected hideout of suicide bombers who struck in Casablanca on Friday night, a newspaper said. In all, 41 people died, 13 of them the young bombers themselves.

　　Face reality

　　In Saudi Arabia, authorities detained a gunman roaming around the US consulate in the eastern city of Dhahran, US officials said. No one was hurt or directly threatened.

　　But a senior member of Saudi Arabia's ruling family said the royal house must not flinch from acknowledging it now had a serious problem with a violent Islamic opposition.

　　"It's time to face reality head-on. There's no need to procrastinate, no room for error," Prince Alwaleed bin Talal said. "We have to acknowledge we have a disease called terrorism. There's no doubt about that any more."

　　Thirty-four people died in the attacks, including Westerners, Saudis and other Arab nationals.

　　It was the first time civilians had been indiscriminately targeted in the kingdom, the birthplace of Islam and of Osama bin Laden, head of the al Qaeda network blamed for last week's bombings and the September 11 attacks on the United States.

　　Saudi officials have acknowledged security lapses and pledged to hunt down those responsible for the bombings, which were condemned by the media and religious leaders as un-Islamic.

　　"If this is not a wake-up call for us we will never wake up. Extremism has to be extracted from its roots, now, not tomorrow," said Prince Alwaleed, one of the world's richest men with international investments worth billions of dollars.

　　"If you have to be in confrontation with a very small segment of society which is vocal and violent, so be it."

　　US officials denied reports Saudis were not cooperating in investigations into last Monday's car bombings of expatriate housing compounds in the capital Riyadh that left 34 dead.

　　One US official said Saudi-born bin Laden's network seemed to have a wider base in the kingdom than they had thought:

　　"We don't believe there are tens of thousands of active al Qaeda members here, but we believe the al Qaeda presence is more than a single cell or two cells," a senior official said.

　　Security sources say there may be three to five al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia, each with several dozen members.

　　Saudi Arabia said on Sunday it had detained four suspected al-Qaeda members who had prior knowledge of the bombings, and was looking for others. The four were among asgroupsof 19 suspects it had identified earlier this month.