Jordan Arrests 3 Hamas Leaders in Latest Crackdown : Mideast: Two are charged with illegal membership and another is deported. Action follows closure of movement’s offices in Amman.

Jordanian police arrested three leaders of the Hamas movement Wednesday, deporting one and filing charges against the others in the latest phase of a crackdown against the Palestinian group.

Jordanian officials said Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’ top political representative in Jordan, and Hamas spokesman Ibrahim Ghosheh were arrested as they stepped off a commercial jet arriving from Iran via the United Arab Emirates. The men were charged with membership in an illegal organization, Deputy Prime Minister Ayman Majali told reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

A third leader, Mousa abu Marzuk, was denied reentry into Jordan and sent back to Iran, apparently because he is not a Jordanian citizen. Marzuk carries a Yemeni passport but was using Egyptian travel documents, Majali said. Marzuk had been deported from Jordan in 1995 and the United States in 1997, then allowed to take up residence again in Jordan by the late King Hussein.

Several aides to the men were also detained, Jordanian officials said.

The action, which followed the closure last month of Hamas offices in Amman, was welcomed by Israeli officials, who have long urged the Jordanian government to rein in the extremist Islamic movement. Hamas is violently opposed to the Middle East peace process and is considered responsible for attacks in Israel that have left scores of people dead in recent years.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, speaking during a visit to Berlin, praised the “courageous” stand of Jordan’s King Abdullah II in taking action against Hamas. Barak said he hoped that leaders in the region would work together to combat terrorism.

Majali said Meshaal and Ghosheh were arrested because their organization had broken an understanding with Jordan under which the group was allowed to carry out political activity within the kingdom but could not engage in violence or challenge Jordanian sovereignty.

“We allow freedom of opinion, but once this exceeds its limits, then the situation is a violation of the law and Jordanian sovereignty, and we will not tolerate this--not today, not tomorrow and not at any time,” Majali said.

In the Gaza Strip, Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin decried the arrests and appealed to the king to set the men free. Yassin said Hamas had been in Jordan for many years and had never broken its informal agreement with the government.

“The change has come from the Jordanian side, as a result of Israeli and American pressures” to crack down on groups that oppose the peace process, Yassin said.

The Hamas leaders had chosen to return to their homes in Jordan--despite government warnings that they would be arrested--because they were convinced that they had done nothing wrong, Yassin said.

It was not immediately clear whether Meshaal and Ghosheh will stand trial. Israeli and Palestinian analysts speculated that the two men might be freed relatively quickly, on condition that Hamas offices remain closed and that the group cease activities in the kingdom.

“Jordan had no choice but to arrest these men after they challenged the authorities by deciding to return,” said Menachem Klein, who specializes in the study of Islamic extremism as a political science professor at Israel’s Bar Ilan University. “But Hamas has a lot of support in Jordan, and they may not go through with a trial.”

The arrests also came against a backdrop of new evidence in Israel linking the militant movement and Israeli Arabs implicated in two recent car bombing attempts. Israelis were shaken by the news that the three people identified as the bombers--who died in the Sept. 5 attacks in northern Israel--were Arab Israeli citizens, reportedly acting on orders of Hamas leaders in Jordan.

Israeli officials have said the three men were linked to the radical wing of the Islamic Movement in Israel. A fourth man whose arrest was announced Tuesday has confessed that the plan was to place explosives on buses heading to Jerusalem but that the bombs went off prematurely, an army spokeswoman said.

Maher Abukhater of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau and special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in the Gaza Strip contributed to this report.

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In some 1997 stories, and stories from 2001 onward, Mousa abu Marzuk is referred to as Mousa abu Marzook.

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