Three police officers were hurt and a gunman was killed in a shooting near the Israeli embassy in Jordan.
According to state media and a security source, a shooting near the tightly guarded Israeli embassy in the capital Amman early on Sunday morning left a shooter dead and three Jordanian police officers wounded. According to the state news station Petra, which cited public security, police shot a shooter who had opened fire on a police patrol in the wealthy Rabiah neighborhood of the capital of Jordan. They also said that investigations were still underway.
A security source claims that the gunman, who was armed with an automatic weapon, was cornered and killed shortly before daybreak after being pursued for at least an hour. Mohamed Momani, Jordan’s minister of communications, called the shooting a terrorist attack that targeted the nation’s public security services. Investigations into the incident are underway, he added in a statement.
“Tampering with the security of the nation and attacking security personnel will be met with a firm response,” Momani told Reuters, adding that the gunman had a criminal record in drug trafficking.
Witnesses reported hearing gunshots, prompting Jordanian police to block off a section close to the tightly guarded embassy. According to two witnesses, police and ambulances raced to the embassy’s location in the Rabiah area.
The region is a hot spot for regular anti-Israel protests. Some of the largest nonviolent demonstrations in the Middle East have taken place throughout the kingdom in response to Israel’s war against the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamasin Gaza.
Due to their expulsion or their parents’ flight to Jordan during the 1948 war that accompanied the establishment of Israel, a large portion of Jordan’s 12 million citizens are of Palestinian descent. On the Israeli side of the Jordan River, many people have family ties. Many Jordanians believe that normalizing relations with Israel betrays the rights of their Palestinian neighbors, which is why they are against the 1994 peace pact.
