Jordanian sentenced to death for 2019 tourist stabbings in Jerash
Amman, Jordan - Jordan’s state security court sentenced a man to death on Tuesday for the 2019 stabbing of eight people, four of them foreign tourists, at one of the kingdom’s ancient sites.
The victims, who included one Swiss and three Mexican tourists, all survived the November 2019 knife attack in the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Jerash, some 50km north of the capital Amman.
Mustafa Abu Ruwais (24) was sentenced to ‘ death by hanging for the terrorist knife attack on tourists’, the court said.
There is no right of appeal against the decisions of Jordan’s state security court.
Abu Ruwais, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin, was at the time of the attack a resident of the Souf camp in Jerash, which houses some 20,000 Palestinian refugees.
He was arrested immediately afterwards and charged with terrorism offences in January last year.
The charge sheet alleged that Abu Ruwais ‘follows the ideology of the Daesh terrorist gang’, a pejorative reference to the Islamic State group, and has been ‘ in contact with one of the members of this organisation in Syria’ who
This file photo shows tourists along at the site of the knife attack in the ancient Roman site of Jerash, 50km north of the Jordanian capital on November 6, 2019
gave the green light for the attack. But there was never any formal claim of responsibility for the attack.
IS led a self-proclaimed caliphate across large swathes of Iraq and Syria between 2014 and its collapse in 2019.
Jordanian forces played a significant part in a US-led coalition that helped defeat the extremists.
At Tuesday’s hearing, the court also found two other defendants guilty, sentencing one to life imprisonment and the other to seven years for complicity.
Both are Jordanians of Palestinian origin like Abu Ruwais.
The Jordanian victims included a tour guide and a security officer who attempted to intervene.
It was not the first time a Jordanian tourist attraction had been attacked.
In December 2016, in Karak, home to one of the region’s biggest Crusader castles, ten people - seven police, two Jordanian civilians and a Canadian tourist - were killed in an attack that also left 30 wounded.