Jordan Arrests 30 Muslim Brothers on Charges of Smuggling Katucha Rockets

Jordan Arrests 30 Muslim Brothers on Charges of  Smuggling Katucha Rockets and Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood Regards This as a Conspiracy Between the Government and Fath Movement Designed to Foil the Palestinian Government
 

The official spokesman of the Jordanian government, Nasser Joudah, declared today, Wednesday, 10 May 2006, that 20 people were arrested and Iranian-made rocket launchers (Katucha) were seized in connection with the weapons smuggling case in which Hamas was accused of storing weapons in Jordan.
At a press conference, Joudah said, “There have been attempts to recruit elements to work for the group in the Jordanian arena and to recruit elements belonging to the movement from the Palestinian territories to send to Syria and Iran to get military training”.
Jordanian authorities stormed at dawn today a number of Muslim Brothers’ houses in different regions in the Kingdom and arrested a number of them. Security forces tampered with household effects and seized computers of the detainees.
For his part, Zaki ben Arsheed, president of the Islamic Action Front Party, and a prominent leader of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, in a special statement to Ikhwanweb,  said, “the detention campaign coincides with another escalation in the Palestinian territories by the Fath movement, which confirms that there is a clear coordination between the Jordanian government and the Fath leadership designed to cause the failure of the Palestinian government formed by Hamas. It is aimed at provoking new crises to bring down the Hamas movement. Since Hamas was able to achieve some progress lately, despite the suffocating international blockade imposed on its government, those events have surfaced to increase pressures and seek to bring Hamas to failure.”
Ben Arsheed pointed out that those arrests came at a time when there was a security delegation from Fath to discuss charges that Hamas maintained weapons caches in Jordan.
With regard to the response of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood (JMB) to those arrests, Ben Arsheed said, “this is not the first time that leading figures and prominent members of the JMB are detained. This confirms the persistence of the Jordanian government to deal with the JMB from a security perspective only, without opening any dialogue to discuss differences.”
Two weeks ago, Jordanian authorities accused Hamas of smuggling arms across Jordanian borders in order to stage attacks on certain targets in Jordan, but Hamas has repeatedly denied those allegations.


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