AMMAN CHEMICAL PLOT
On 03/31/2004 the JORDANIAN security forces seized a truck loaded with explosives in the border cross with Syria in Ramtha, North West Jordan.
On 04/10/2004 the JORDANIAN police seized two more car bombs in Irbid, not far from Ramtha. Eventually the JORDANIAN authorities seized 5 car bombs loaded with 17.5 tones explosives and chemicals. Most of the explosives were manufactured from fertilizers by the group in a farm house in Kufor Jayez, in North Jordan, not far from Irbid.
Sulayman Khalid Darwish, the Syrian coordinator between Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Iraq and his network in Jordan and the Syrian Haytham Omar Ibrahim, who arranged a network of safe houses in Syria and North Jordan, managed to escape.
On Tuesday 04/20/2004, the JORDANIAN police raided an apartment in Hashemya neighborhood, in Amman, in order to arrest the rest of the group members: Muwaffaq Adwan , Hassan Simsmiyyeh, Salah Marjehm and Ibrahim Abu al Kheir – all were killed during the raid after they refused to surrender and started shooting the security men. The other members: Azmi Jayyousi, a senior operative of Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Jordan, as well as Ahmad Samir, Hussein Sharif Hussein, the Syrian Anas Sheikh Amin, Mohammad Salameh Shaaban and Husni Sharif Hussein were arrested. The group used the ephemeral name “Kataib Al-Tawhid”** – The Battalions of the Unitarians
JORDANIAN authorities said they had broken up an alleged Al Qaeda plot that would have unleashed a deadly – and never used before – cloud of chemicals in the heart of Jordan’s capital. The plot, according to the JORDANIAN government, would have been more deadly than anything Al Qaeda has done before, including The 9/11.
The foiled attacks were supposed to target the USA Embassy, the JORDANIAN Prime Minister’s office and the headquarters of JORDANIAN intelligence, among others. The plan was to detonate, simultaneously, few car bombs loaded with 20 tones of mixed explosives with large amount of chemical such as chlorine and ammonia.
In an audiotape broadcasted on the web, on 04/30/2004, a voice, probably the voice of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, took responsibility on series of attacks in Iraq and also referred to the foiled Chemical plot in Amman. Abu Musab al Zarqawi accused the JORDANIAN government of allowing Americans to “send in Muslims to be tortured and jailed” in the JORDANIAN kingdom, and that the JORDANIAN embassy in Baghdad was used to assist Israeli intelligence: “providing the Israeli spies with what they need from fake passports to documents.”
On 02/15/2005 Azmi Jayyousi, Ahmad Samir, Hussein Sharif Hussein, Anas Sheikh Amin, Mohammad Salameh Shaaban and Husni Sharif Hussein were sentenced to death. The other perpetrators in the plot were also sentenced to death in absentia. Today (01/2008) the verdict was not yet executed.
Summary ;
There is no doubt that Syria played a crucial role in the build up of the Amman Chemical attack. Some of the explosives were smuggled in large quantity from Iraq through Syria to Jordan. The operation was coordinated by the Syrian Sulayman Khalid Darwish in Syria and Syria overlooked the activity, not for the first time.
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** “Al-Tawhid “ (the Unitarians) is an Islamic ideology that there is a unification of the prophet Mohamed and God. Therefore the words and teaching of Mohamed are not an interpretation of Gods’ words but the words of God himself.
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