Syrian Held as Key Suspect in Attack Near U.S. Warship

A Syrian linked to an Iraq-based terrorist group has been arrested as the prime suspect in the rocket attack that barely missed a U.S. warship docked in the port of Aqaba, the Jordanian government said Monday.

The government statement, read on state television, said the suspect, Mohammed Hassan Abdullah Sihly, plotted and carried out the Friday attack along with two of his sons and an Iraqi. The other alleged conspirators were reportedly in Iraq.

The statement said the plotters were part of an Iraq-based terrorist group led by Mohammed Hamid Hussein, the Iraqi alleged to have been involved in the attack. It did not name the group.

Sihly, who lives in Amman, the Jordanian capital, was joined by his two sons, Abdullah and Abdul-Rahman, and Hussein in “carrying out the heinous crime,” in which three Katyusha rockets were fired from a hilltop warehouse on a hill above the southern Jordanian city of Aqaba, near the Israeli border, the statement said.

One rocket flew across the bow of a U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship and crashed into a warehouse, killing a Jordanian soldier. Two other missiles flew toward Israel; one landed near a Jordanian hospital, the other on the outskirts of the airport in Eilat, on Israel’s southern tip.