Author: Reuters
Publication: Arab News
Date: August 2, 2010
URL: http://arabnews.com/middleeast/article94396.ece
Rockets from Egypt's Sinai, an area where
militants have operated in the past, struck Israel's and Jordan's Red Sea
port resorts on Monday, killing a Jordanian civilian and injuring three others,
Jordanian and Israeli police said.
A Jordanian interior ministry source said
one of the four injured when one rocket exploded near a five star hotel in
Aqaba, died from his injuries.
There was no word of casualties in the adjacent
Israeli port and holiday resort of Eilat, police said.
Asked where the Aqaba rocket was fired, the
Jordanian source said without elaborating: "It came from the west."
Experts were investigating the site to find out where the short-range rocket
had been launched, he said.
Egyptian security sources were quoted by the
state news agency as saying rockets could not have been fired from Sinai.
EXPLOSION BY BEACH
Jordanian resident Ibrahim Salymehin said
he heard one loud blast and when he arrived at the scene in Aqaba he saw at
least three injured men taken to a nearby hospital by ambulance.
A crowd gathered near the scene of the explosion
several hundred meters away from a five star hotel close to the beach.
"We saw the wreckage of a taxi which
was burnt and fragmented metal scattered around the area that was cordoned
off by police," Aqaba resident Abdullah Yashin Rawashdehd told Reuters.
Eilat District Police Commander Moshe Cohen
told Israel Radio that his forces were still trying to confirm that five explosions
heard in the morning had been caused by shelling.
Two of the suspected rockets or mortar bombs
appeared to have landed in the sea, while another hit Aqaba, he said. "It's
a little early to say, but it is reasonable to assume that it came from the
southern area," he said, referring to neighboring Egypt, whose Sinai
desert has seen occasional violence attributed to Islamist militants.
No group claimed responsibility for the attack.
At least one rocket struck Aqaba on April
22, causing no casualties. Amman said the rocket had been fired from outside
Jordan and Israeli media said Sinai was a possible launch point.
In 2005, rockets were fired at US warships
in Aqaba but missed their target and killed a Jordanian soldier on land. A
group claiming links to Al-Qaeda said it was behind the attack.
Two years later, a Palestinian suicide bomber
infiltrated through Sinai and killed three people at an Eilat bakery.
Jordan and Egypt are the only Arab states
to have full peace accords with Israel. Those ties were frayed by Israel's
crackdown in 2000 on a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
