Jordan swoops on suspects after rocket attack

Police in Jordan today detained several suspects as the hunt widened for the militants who fired the rockets that narrowly missed a US Navy ship anchored off Aqaba.

Those arrested included Iraqis, Syrians, Egyptians and Jordanians, according to a Jordanian security official.

In what he called a breakthrough, Interior Minister Awni Yirfas said that security forces had found the launcher used to fire the three rockets.

The Gulf of Aqaba, a narrow northern extension of the Red Sea, is bordered by Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia with the frontiers of the four countries touching or within view of one another.

The Abdullah Azzam Brigades – an al Qaida-linked group that responsibility for the bombings which killed at least 64 people at Sharm el-Sheik in July and 34 people at two other Egyptian resorts last October – said in an internet statement that its men had fired the missiles.

Officials said a warehouse – overlooking Aqaba from a hillside industrial zone - was used to launch the notoriously inaccurate Katyusha rockets. It had been rented days beforehand by four men carrying Iraqi and Egyptian identity papers.

A Jordanian soldier was killed and another wounded when one Katyusha flew across the bow of the USS Ashland and hit a warehouse used by the Americans to store goods headed to Iraq.

Two more rockets were fired toward Israel, whose border is next to Aqaba. One fell short and hit the wall of a Jordanian military hospital. The other landed close to Israel’s Eilat airport, lightly wounding a taxi driver.