Zarqawi's family wants him buried in Jordan
The family of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said today they want to bury him in his hometown, but a security official vowed the terror leader who killed Jordanians in a triple hotel bombing would never be interred in Jordan.
“I and all members of our family want him (Al-Zarqawi) to be buried in his home town of Zarqa,” Sayel al-Khalayleh said.
He said that they still have not spoken to any government official about returning his body to Jordan “But everybody must understand that his place must be near his family,” he said. “He is a martyr and should be treated as such.”
Al-Zarqawi was born Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayleh in Jordan and grew up in the industrial town of Zarqa, east of the capital Amman. He left in 1999 for Afghanistan, where he remained until just after the 2001 US invasion of that country, when he moved to Iraq.
There he led a bloody campaign of suicide bombings for three years until he was killed Wednesday in a US airstrike outside of Baqouba, north-east of Baghdad.
In November 2005, his al Qaida in Iraq organisation carried out a triple suicide bombing against hotels in Amman that killed 60 people, most of them Jordanians.
A top Jordanian security official said today that the government will not allow al-Zarqawi “under any circumstances” to be buried in Jordan and “stain Jordanian soil.” He pointed to the killings in the Amman attack.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the press. But he said he was giving the government position on the issue.
The US military in Baghdad had no immediate comment on where al-Zarqawi’s body is or whether it would be returned to his family for burial.
There is a precedent for returning the bodies of major figures to their families in the Iraq conflict. The military returned the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s two sons, Odai and Qusai, to their relatives after they were killed in a gunbattle with US forces in July 2003. The two brothers were buried in Saddam’s home region of Tikrit, north of Baghdad.
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