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September 5, 2006

Jordan: Muslim Shoots Six Tourists - One Dead

Yesterday in the Roman amphitheater in Amman, Jordan (left), a Palestinian-born Muslim, shouting "Allah Akbar" shot six tourists, killing one Britain and wounding five others. One of the injured is in a serious but stable condition in hospital.

The news is carried by Expatica, AKI, the BBC, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Times and Associated Press via Topix.net.

The amphitheater is surrounded by a busy metropolis, and is hard to be protected from militants, compared to the other ancient tourist site of Petra, which is in the desert and has a constant police presence. The people who were shot were part of a tour party, and at around midday they were about to go up the steps leading from the ancient stage when the gunman attacked.

He fired 12 shots in all. The majority of tourists were hit in the back. 30-year old Briton, Christopher Stokes was shot dead. The most seriously injured of the tourists was 47-year old Karen Sparkes from Wiltshire, southwestern England. Shot from behind, the bullet blew away her right collar bone and exited via her chest. Another British tourist was shot, as well as a New Zealander and a man from Holland. A policeman was also shot twice, but joined with local Jordanians to chase and overpower the man as he fled through the streets outside the amphitheater.

The gunman fired twelve shots from what appears to have been an automatic pistol. Eyewitnesses claim the gun appeared to become jammed, causing him to flee. He had stalked the tourists, lying in wait in the gardens of the adjacent Hashemite Square before approaching.

Karen Sparke said; "The first I heard was a popping noise that sounded like a firework. We all turned round and looked back down the steps and the next thing I noticed was that I had been shot. There was blood everywhere, people shouting, it was bedlam."

"It was just such cruel luck. Our tour party had got to know one another well after travelling in Syria together for several days and it was just bad luck that the ones at the rear of the group as we left the amphitheatre got hit. The man who died was very friendly, a very chatty person," she said.

She told BBC News 24 that; "a really nice man from a shop came and told us to hide in his store." The store was a clothes shop, owned by Saher Zarou, who said: "I wiped blood coming from the back of one woman and from the thighs of two others before police came and drove them to the hospital."

The gunman is 38-year old Nabil Ahmed Issa Jaaoura, born in the Baqaa Palestinian refugee camp near the city, who had lived in Zarqa, the same slum town where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had grown up and graduated into crime and ultimately terrorism. Jaoura, a blacksmith by trade, is a father of five children.

The attack is the first in Jordan since the hotel bombings of November 9, which had killed 60 people. These had been ordered by Zarqawi.

Nasser Judeh, a Jordanian government spokesman, said that Jaaoura had "no ties to any armed group or any suspicious group inside or outside Jordan."

Joost Hiltermann, of the International Crisis Group said yesterday: "There's a very strong supportive climate here for activity that attacks either the regime or the United States, and the two of course are closely allied, but there's very little ability to do anything. The Jordanians can talk as much as they want but they are so infiltrated by the security police here that they can't move to the operational stage, so what you get are individuals, loners who happen to have a gun. That's probably what we saw today."

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at September 5, 2006 8:08 AM

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