AMMAN, 1 September 2005 — Jordan has slapped a censorship order on terror-related trials to protect witnesses and judges, state-run media announced yesterday, a month after a militant leader claimed he had been following news coverage of militant court cases. The order, effective immediately, applies to all court cases, including trials involving militants like Jordanian-born Abu-Musab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of the Al-Qaeda in Iraq terror group, said at least two military officials who declined to be identified further because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Jordanian newspapers and television said the order was issued by military State Security Court attorney general, Brig. Yousef Faouri, who declined to answer repeated calls from The Associated Press yesterday. “The attorney general of the State Security Court demands all media institutions to refrain from publishing the full names and the military titles of judges and witnesses as well as details on trial proceedings at the military court unless they coordinate with him” before publishing their reports, said the announcement. It quoted Faouri as saying that recent unspecified reports “constituted a threat to the lives of (judges and witnesses) and exposed them to harassment.” No further details were available.
Tareq Al-Momani, president of the Jordan Press Association, slammed the court’s move, saying it obstructed the public’s access to information. “I am against this move because citizens must have access to information and they have the right to know the truth,” Momani told the AP. The State Security Court tries militants, drug traffickers and cases considered threats to national security and financial stability. The court was formed under martial law, which had existed since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War until the law’s annulment in 1992.
Trials involving suspected militants who allegedly plotted attacks in Jordan are expected to resume after the court emerges from a summer break Sept. 2. On July 6, purported Al-Qaeda official Seif Al-Adel claimed in an Internet statement that he has “followed the military trials at the Jordanian State Security Court of our brothers the Jordanians who fought in Afghanistan and the several splintered Islamic groups which had tried to carry out jihad (holy war) against the state of the Zionist enemy in dear Palestine from Jordanian territory.”
Among the most prominent in the media reports on trials in Jordan were Zarqawi and his spiritual mentor Sheik Abu-Mohammed Al-Maqdisi, whose real name is Isam Mohammad Taher Al-Barqawi, Al-Adel said in the statement The militant suggested he did not know either men, but became acquainted with their ideas through court hearings.
Al-Zarqawi is Al-Qaeda’s point man in Iraq responsible for scores of deadly terrorist attacks, kidnappings and beheadings of foreigners. The United States has placed a $25 million bounty on his head. Jordan’s military court sentenced him to death for the slaying of a US aid worker gunned down outside his Amman home in October 2002.
Maqdisi was Zarqawi’s cellmate in a Jordanian prison for four years until both men were freed under a 1999 royal amnesty. Zarqawi left to Afghanistan and later Iraq. Maqdisi was freed briefly and later captured for other terror plots, the last was on July 6 when Jordanian authorities detained him for allegedly making contacts with unnamed foreign terrorist groups.
