Jordan said Monday the authorities have captured the main suspect involved in the rocket attack in the Red Sea port city of Aqaba Friday.
An interior ministry statement said an Iraq-based "terrorist group," which it did not name, had planned and carried out the triple-mortar attack that killed one Jordanian soldier and injured another.
The rocket attack apparently targeted two U.S. war ships docked at an Aqaba port, but missed and hit a Jordanian military depot that killed the soldier, another fell near a military hospital in the city and a third landed in the nearby Israeli city of Eilat.
The statement said the authorities captured "the main element," identified as Mohammad Hassan Abdullah al-Sahli, whom it said carries Syrian citizenship and resides in the low-income neighborhood of Hai Nazzal in the capital, Amman.
The ministry said the other three members of the unnamed terrorist organization, including its leader, had fled to Iraq a few hours before the rockets were fired from a rented warehouse in an industrial zone in Aqaba.
It identified the fugitive leader as Iraqi national Mohammad Hamid Hassan, also known as Abu Mukhtar, and the others as Abdullah Mohammad Hassan al-Sahli and Abdul Rahman Mohammad Hassan al-Sahli, all carrying Iraqi passports under different names.
The ministry said the three men entered the country from the Iraqi border in a car where they smuggled seven Russian-made short-range Katyusha rockets in an "amended gas tank" and carried out surveillance in Aqaba earlier in the month to plan their "effective operation against vital installations."
It added that after renting a warehouse in Aqaba, they managed to smuggle the rockets into the resort town and stored the missiles, after which the three men left for Iraq at dawn on Friday.
"Investigations showed that while preparing for the operation, the terrorist group was in constant contact with its leadership in Iraq to brief it on the developments," the statement said.
While it did not say the authorities had captured the person who had carried out the attack, the statement indicated the man who was arrested, the Syrian national, had fired the missiles.
