Jordanian official says all prison hostages released
Inmates at a Jordanian prison released the last three of about half a dozen police officers they had taken hostage and ended a riot that broke out over the fate of two convicted al-Qaida killers.
Maj. Gen. Owad al-Khalidi, the assistant director general of the public security directorate, announced the end of the prison rioting and hostage taking on Jordan Television, saying it “is over".
Maj. Bashir Da'aja said in a faxed statement that "the situation at Juweideh prison has been resolved peacefully and everything has returned to normal inside the jail".
Reporters at the prison site said a blockade of the area had been lifted and people were being allowed to approach.
The crisis began winding down shortly before the last three hostages were freed. The inmates then released the director of the kingdom’s penitentiaries, Col. Saad al-Ajrami, and two other police officers.
It was unclear how many inmates were involved in the riot and hostage taking, but Da’aja said there were 79 Islamist inmates at Juweideh prison.
One of the inmates’ demands was for new trials in civil courts as some had been convicted and sentenced by military tribunals.
Da’aja said the riots broke out at Juweideh when prisoners demanded that at least two inmates, including the al-Qaida-linked killer of an American diplomat, be transferred from the Swaqa prison to theirs.
But an Islamic activist in Jordan said inmates began rioting after they heard reports that the two convicted al-Qaida members were being taken away for execution. Da’aja denied that and said that “no execution order was ever issued".
The activist said he had got his information from families of inmates who were in the prison at the time the rioting broke out. The activist himself was once in the same prison.
Da’aja denied media reports that shooting broke out during the riot and said the country’s other prisons, including the one housing the two death row inmates, were under control. No rioting broke out there, he said.
The incident was the second this month in the region involving al Qaida prisoners.
In Yemen, 23 al-Qaida convicts tunnelled out of a high-security jail in early February, including a man convicted of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole destroyer. Yemen’s president has said at least three have turned themselves in.
Juweideh prison is one of five disciplinary jails where 180 Muslim militants including a number of al Qaida members are incarcerated.
The two main inmates the rioters want transferred are Jordanian Azmi al-Jayousi and Libyan Salem bin Suweid, Da’aja said.
Al-Jayousi was sentenced to death on February 15 for a 2004 plot to carry out chemical attacks against sites in Jordan, including the US Embassy. Jordanian-born terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was also sentenced to death in absentia for the plot.
The mastermind behind the plot, Al-Jayousi was convicted for conspiring to attack various sites in Jordan by setting off a cloud of toxic chemicals that would have killed thousands of people.
Suweid was sentenced to death, along with al-Zarqawi, for being the triggerman in the 2002 assassination of US diplomat Lawrence Foley in Amman.
