Jordan Times
Monday, January 10, 2005
16 charged with plotting attacks
AMMAN — Sixteen people were formally charged on Sunday by State Prosecutor Mahmoud Obeidat with plotting subversive acts against American, Jewish and General Intelligence Department (GID) targets in the Kingdom in 2004.
Obeidat summoned 15 of the 16 suspects, most of them residents of Irbid, to his office to officially notify them of the charges against them, which also include possessing unlicensed weapons.
The 16th suspect, Khalid Fawzi, is being tried in absentia on the same charges.
The defendants were identified in the charge sheet as Abed Shehadeh, 50, Ahmad Yousef, 20, Ahmad Mukhles, 19, Muhanad Yassin, 18, Saber Mohammad, 20, Mohammad Khader, 19, Mohammad Abdul Karim, 24, Imaddin Ibrahim, 29, Ahmad Bashir, 30, Abdullah Mohammad, 28, Hussein Abdullah, 20, Mohammad Ahmad, 26, Mohammad Kamel, 27, Abdullah Ali, 33, and Ahmad Fayez, 30.
The charge sheet said the first defendant in the case, Abed Shehadeh, lived in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan between 1979 and 1990.
During that period, the charge sheet said, Shehadeh received training on various kinds of weapons.
“In 1990, he was expelled from Saudi Arabia for his takfir thoughts (labelling people as apostates) against the Saudi ruling family,” according to the charge sheet.
When he came to Jordan, the charge sheet added, he started giving religious classes in Irbid mosques and attacked Arab regimes.
He managed to recruit the rest of the defendants through his religious classes and the group collected money and bought weapons, the charge sheet said. Their first alleged plan was to launch attacks on the American and Israeli embassies in Amman, according to the charge sheet. They also allegedly planned to kill journalist Oreib Rantawi for attacking Abu Mussab Zarqawi in one of his programmes, GID officer Khaldoun Masri for allegedly “harassing young Muslim men” and the director of the Jerash Festival Jeries Samawi. The charge sheet did not specify a reason for targetting him. The defendants allegedly planned to attack Joud Hotel in Irbid “since most of its occupants are Jews,” and a school in Hartha, Irbid, where foreign archaeologists were staying, the charge sheet said. They also plotted to attack an American group that performed in the July 2004 Jerash Festival, but abandoned their alleged plans “because of the extra security measures,” the charge sheet stated. A judicial source told The Jordan Times the suspects will be referred to the State Security Court within the next few weeks.