AMMAN, 3 November 2006 — Jordan’s military prosecutor yesterday indicted three Jordanians suspected of being in the Palestinian Hamas movement of plotting terror attacks in the kingdom, judicial sources said.
According to the charge sheet, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, the three suspects were charged with “conspiracy to carry out terrorist acts,” and illegal possession of explosives and weapons.
They face the death penalty if convicted in their trial, a date for which has not yet been announced.
The three were arrested in April and May as part of a sweep that netted 20 people, and on May 11 confessed on state television that they had plotted to kill senior officials in Jordan’s intelligence services.
At the time, Ayman Naji Hamadallah, a 34-year-old identified as the plot’s mastermind, spoke of his links to Hamas and said he had staked out the home of an intelligence officer who was to be targeted.
Hamadallah, who said he made frequent trips to Syria, said that after his arrest he tipped off the authorities about a weapons cache in northern Jordan. Footage of the seized weapons, including Iranian-made Katyusha rockets, was also shown on television. The other two suspects are Ahmad Abu Rabieh, 27, and Ahmed Abu Diab, 29, who has been described as a Muslim preacher from Mafraq, a border town with Syria.
Officials have said the suspects were members of Hamas who entered the country from Syria, and placed full responsibility on the Palestinian group for the attempts to destabilize Jordan.
Jordanian Charged with Slandering King
A former Jordanian royal court chief was charged yesterday with slandering the king in a television interview he gave to the Arabic satellite channel Al-Jazeera, judicial sources said.
Adnan Abu Audeh, 75, was also accused of fueling national discord and inciting division after remarks he made in Saturday’s broadcast.
In the program he referred to an incident in the 1970s during King Hussein’s reign when a Cabinet minister refused to allocate $20,000 for a project in Jerusalem. Abu Audeh recalled that he told the former official at the time: “Your king has lost Jerusalem and your king must recover it,” in reference to King Abdullah II’s late father King Hussein who died in February 1999.
Abu Audeh faces up to three years in prison if found guilty, the sources said.
