AMMAN, 2 July 2007 — Relatives of four Jordanians jailed by Israel yesterday expressed disappointment over the conditions under which the Israeli government transferred the four men to serve the rest of their prison terms in Jordan. The head of the Committee of Prisoners’ Families, Saleh Ajlouni, said “as head of the panel, I reject the version of the deal because the prisoners are heroes who should be honored rather than sent to jail.”
“We are displeased over this decision and we wish we could reject it,” said Ajlouni, who is also brother of one of the prisoners, Sultan Ajlouni.
He was commenting on an Israeli Cabinet decision earlier in the day to allow four Jordanians convicted of killing an Israeli soldier to serve the rest of their sentence in Jordan.
According to Israeli media, the four have been serving sentences ranging from 25 years to life imprisonment, after being found guilty of killing an Israeli soldier in Jordan Valley in November 1990. “We feel sad because the four Jordanians will be transferred from a prison to another prison,” said Nabil Al-Sane, brother of prisoner Amin Al-Sane, in remarks to reporters. “They should have been freed when the peace treaty was concluded between Israel and Jordan in 1994 and as one of the pact’s provisions as is the case in similar international cases,” he added.
The Jordanian National Committee on Prisoners and Captives also condemned the deal and urged the Jordanian government “to refrain from recording a dishonorable attitude by sending our heroes who were freed from Zionist jails to Jordanian prisons.”
“They have obeyed slogans raised by successive (Jordanian) governments that the Zionist entity is an enemy which should be fought,” the panel said in a statement. It expressed fears that the deal that was concluded between the Israeli and Jordanian governments “was designed to close the files of the remaining 30 Jordanian prisoners in Israeli jails and 25 citizens who are missing in Israel.”
