Jordan attacks kill 57
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, November 9, 2005
AMMAN, Jordan – Suicide bombers carried out nearly simultaneous attacks on three western chain hotels here Wednesday night, killing at least at least 57 people, wounding more than 100 others and emphatically ending Jordan’s status as an oasis of relative calm in the Middle East.
The blasts struck the Grand Hyatt, Radisson SAS and Days Inn in the Jordanian capital just before 9 p.m., sending clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky and leaving bloodied victims lying on plush carpeted lobby floors.
At the Radisson, an assailant detonated an explosive belt in the midst of a wedding party in a crowded banquet hall, resulting in extensive casualties, officials said. At the Days Inn, a bomber with a booby-trapped car was unable to breach the security perimeter outside the hotel before detonating his explosives, Deputy Prime Minister Mawan Muasher said.
Emergency workers rushing to the scenes used bellman’s carts to carry the wounded out of the hotels. The flood of victims overwhelmed local hospitals.
A surgeon at Istiqlal Hospital reported “bodies coming left and right.” Sixteen corpses were placed in a single room and dozens of the injured were in peril of dying overnight, the surgeon said.
No group claimed immediate responsibility for the bombings, but Western intelligence officials said the multiple, tightly coordinated suicide attacks focusing on relatively soft targets bore the hallmark of the al-Qaida network. Muasher, in an interview on CNN, said while it was too early to tell for sure, he believed al-Qaida-affiliated Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was “obviously the prime suspect.”
Jordanian security forces went into high alert, deploying throughout the capital around hotels, embassies and malls. The Jordanian government sealed off the country’s land borders and announced that all government and public offices would be closed in mourning today.
Jordan has long enjoyed a reputation as a safe zone sandwiched between its violent unstable neighbors – Israel and the Palestinian territories to the west, Iraq to the east. Nestled amid the tumult, Jordan looks at first blush like a sleepy strip of desert and rugged mountains, tourist-friendly and eager to get along politically with the other Arab countries as well as the West.
As suicide attacks took place routinely in Israel, and large-scale bombings have rocked hotels in Egypt and in neighboring Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Jordan had largely escaped the region’s violence.
Early reports indicated that the majority of the victims Wednesday were Jordanian civilians. The injured include Moustafa Akad, internationally famed Syrian-born film director of “The Message” and “Lion of the Desert”. Akad’s 30-year-old daughter, Reem, died in one of the blasts.
Madison Conoley a spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Amman, said no American citizens appeared to have been injured. The embassy was advising Americans in Amman to take what the spokesman called “common sense” precautions such as “avoiding large crowds and keeping a low profile.”
Tahir Masry, a former prime minister, said the attacks prove that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 has begun to seriously destabilize the region.
“Iraq was not the source of terrorism (before the invasion),” Masry said, “but now it has become exactly that.”
Associated Press
Police guard the shattered front entrance of the Grand Hyatt hotel in Amman, Jordan, after Wednesday’s bombing.
