http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSL01489085

NOUAKCHOTT, Feb 1 (Reuters) – Gunmen opened fire on the Israeli embassy in Mauritania on Friday, wounding three bystanders including a French woman, days after anti-Israeli protests calling for the government to sever diplomatic ties.

The Israeli ambassador in Nouakchott said no embassy staff were hurt in the shooting in the early hours of Friday morning, which came just over a month after two attacks by suspected al Qaeda militants in the West African country.

Some witnesses said the attackers, who numbered at least three, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest) as they exchanged fire with guards at the fortified embassy, located in a tree-lined street of the dusty Mauritanian capital.

The attack followed appeals by political parties for President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi to break off diplomatic relations with Israel amid anger in Mauritania over recent events in Gaza, which is under an Israeli blockade.

The western Saharan country is one of just three Arab countries to have relations with the Jewish state, including Jordan and Egypt.

“This is very sad. The relation between Israel and Mauritania is a symbol of peace,” Israeli Ambassador Boaz Bismuth told Reuters, saying the embassy was hit by bullets.”A shooting on a foreign embassy is a very serious incident.”

Israel radio reported a defence official would leave for Mauritania on Friday to check security measures and Israeli embassies around the world had been placed on alert.

The gunmen also sprayed bullets at a nightclub about 50 metres (yards) from the embassy on the same street, injuring its two Mauritanian owners and a French woman, Nouakchott’s governor Mohamed Lemine Ould Zeine told Reuters.

The woman was injured when bullets hit the car she was in and she was taken to hospital by a companion.

The shooting stoked further fears of an upsurge of Islamic extremist violence in Mauritania, an Islamic Republic which straddles black and Arab Africa. In late December, suspected Mauritanian members of al Qaeda’s North African branch killed four French tourists and some soldiers in two separate attacks.

SECURITY FEARS

Mauritanian soldiers on Friday sealed off the Israeli embassy building, which is protected by concrete blocks built across the road. These and the guards appeared to have prevented the attackers from approaching further.

U.S.-based IntelCenter, which monitors Web messages of Islamist groups, says al Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri called for attacks on the embassy in February 2007.

The shooting came just weeks after the 2008 Lisbon-Dakar rally, which was due to pass through Mauritania, was cancelled due to a security alarm caused by the two December killings.

“It is absolutely unfortunate and unacceptable that the country has suffered three major attacks in one month,” former Mauritanian foreign minister Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, now U.N. envoy to Somalia, told Reuters at an African summit in Ethiopia.

“It is a small country and we cannot afford this.”

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) of Algeria, claimed responsibility for the December soldiers’ killings.

Two suspected killers of the French tourists, who also confessed to being al Qaeda members, are being held in Nouakchott after they were extradited from Guinea-Bissau.

President Abdallahi has denied the existence of a terrorist cell in Mauritania, while religious leaders and politicians from all parties have condemned December’s attacks.

“Al Qaeda as an organisation doesn’t exist here but we’re a large country, bordering Algeria, Morocco and Mali, so it is possible that ideas and people close to al Qaeda have entered,” said Jemil Ould Mohamed Mansour, head of the Islamic RNRD party.

(Additional reporting by Ibrahima Sylla in Nouakchott and Daniel Wallis in Addis Ababa; Writing Daniel Flynn and Pascal Fletcher)