Madrid, Spain ? Police on Tuesday arrested 20 people suspected of recruiting fighters and raising money for the Iraqi insurgency, the interior minister said.

Police broke up two well-organized and interconnected cells, one based in Madrid and the other in the Barcelona-area town of Vilanova i la Geltru, Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso told a news conference.

Police made 16 pre-dawn arrests in Vilanova i la Geltru, three in Madrid and one in Lasarte in the Basque region.

The cell based in Vilanova i la Geltru may have been behind a suicide attack in November 2003 that killed 19 Italian military personnel and civilians in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah, Alonso said. He added that the two cells had links to people in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

Fifteen of the detainees are Moroccan, three are Spaniards, one is Turkish and one is Algerian, Alonso said.

Last month, Spanish authorities arrested 16 people suspected of recruiting insurgents to stage attacks in Iraq, Chechnya and Kashmir. Two other suspects surrendered. A judge jailed six of them and freed the other 12, although they were ordered to check in with the court weekly and surrender their passports.

Alonso said the Barcelona-area cell broken up Tuesday, may have started sending fighters to Iraq around late 2003.

Investigators have turned up no evidence the cells were planning an imminent attack in Spain. But Alonso said they could not rule out the possibility the cells were plotting something eventually in Spain or elsewhere in Europe.