2 Americans among dead in Jordan attack
Training facility incident raises fears of terrorism.
At least five people, including two U.S. trainers, are killed by a Jordanian police officer who fired on them before he was shot to death, officials said.
At least five people, including two U.S. trainers, were killed Monday at an Amman training compound by a Jordanian police officer who fired on them before he was shot to death, the government said.
The shooting in the Jordanian capital immediately raised concerns of a possible infiltration of the training program by anti-American militants. Jordan, a U.S. ally, has been involved in the U.S.-led aerial bombing campaign against Islamic State targets in neighboring Syria and Iraq for the past year.
Jordanian and U.S. officials said it was premature to speculate on the motive of the gunman, who was identified in official statements only as a Jordanian police officer.
The Jordan Times newspaper quoted an unnamed relative of the assailant as saying he was Anwar Abu Zaid, a 28-year-old police captain and university graduate who was married with two children and was from the northern Jordanian village of Rimoun. The newspaper said residents were in “complete shock” over the shootings and described the assailant as “a very kind person, who is religious but moderate.”
A Jordanian government spokesman, Mohammad Momani, said the dead included two U.S. trainers working with the Public Security Department and a South African trainer. He said two Jordanian civil employees also were killed, including one who died later from wounds suffered in the shooting.
Momani’s statement also said two other U.S. trainers and at least two Jordanians had been wounded by the gunman, and that “police forces dealt with the incident and killed the attacker.”
In Washington, President Barack Obama said that the United States was conducting a “full investigation” of the assault.
“We take this very seriously and we’ll be working closely with the Jordanians to determine exactly what happened,” Obama told reporters in the Oval Office.
A U.S. official described the gunman as a Jordanian police officer who had been fired, but there was no immediate corroboration of such a detail.
A second U.S. official said the assailant, armed with an AK-47, had come “back to the base where he just sprayed fire.”
“He didn’t seem to be targeting anything in particular,” the second official said.
The timing of the training center attack — 10 years after suicide bombers attacked three hotels in Amman on Nov. 9, 2005, killing nearly 60 and wounding more than 100 — raised questions about whether there was a link.
The State Department runs and finances the program at the Amman compound to train Iraqi and Palestinian police officers.
John Kirby, a spokesman for the State Department, told reporters at a daily briefing in Washington that the U.S. victims had worked for DynCorp, a private security company, and were so-called trainer monitors overseeing the curriculum of the program, which has been in operation since 2008. Kirby did not release the names of the victims.