Jordan executes 15 criminals, 10 for terrorism convictions

AMMAN: Jordan executed 15 people on Saturday including 10 convicted on terrorism charges ranging from an attack a decade ago on Western tourists to the slaying of a writer, a judicial source and the government spokesman Mohammad al Momani said on Saturday.

Al Momani said those executed included one man who was convicted of an attack last year on an intelligence compound that killed five security personnel.

Another five were involved in an assault by security forces on a militant hideout in Irbid city in the same year that led to the death of seven militants and one police officer, while the rest related to separate incidents that go back as far as 2003.

A judicial source said the authorities also executed a gunman who last year shot dead outside a court a Christian writer who was standing trial for contempt of religion after sharing on social media a caricature insulting Islam.

Also among the 10 was a gunman convicted of firing at a group of Western tourists near the Roman amphitheater in downtown Amman in 2006, killing one Briton and injuring five other people, the judicial source added.

It was the largest round of executions in recent memory, and the first since Jordan launched a crackdown on Islamic extremists two years ago, after the killing of a captured Jordanian fighter pilot by the Daesh group.

Jordan is a part of a US-led military coalition against Daesh, which holds territory in Syria and Iraq.

The prisoners were hanged at dawn Saturday at Swaqa Prison, about 75 kilometers (47 kilometers) south of the capital of Amman, said government spokesman Mohammed Momani.

Five others were executed for other



crimes, including incest, Momani said in a statement carried by the state news agency Petra.

The assailants executed Saturday for terror convictions had been involved in six different incidents, from a 2003 bombing attack that killed 19 at Jordan’s embassy in Iraq to the September 2016 shooting of local writer Nahed Hattar on the steps of an Amman courthouse.

Also listed were a 2006 shooting attack on a group of tourists at a Roman theater in Amman in which a 30-year-old British man was killed; a December 2015 shooting attack that killed two police officers; a March 2016 shootout between police and Daesh militants at their hideout in which an officer was killed; and a June 2016 attack by a lone gunman on an office of Jordan’s intelligence agency that killed five.

Hattar, the writer, had been on trial for posting a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam on social media when an assailant killed him outside the courthouse. The shooter was a former mosque prayer leader motivated by anger over the cartoon, officials said at the time.

Saad Hattar, a cousin of the victim, said Saturday that while the killer was punished, those who instigated such attacks with hateful rhetoric were not.

“The murderer was just a tool, and our society needs the uprooting of the ideology and the culture behind him,” Hattar, a journalist, told The Associated Press.

Analyst Labib Kamhawi said he believes the executions were meant to send a triple message. They signaled to potential attackers that they can expect harsh punishment and reminded ordinary Jordanians buckling under price increases that their country faces a serious security threat, he said.