Amman – Arab media reports that the Jordanian government arrested 21 Muslim Brotherhood members for smuggling weapons and money into the West Bank.
The Brotherhood members are accused of creating a secret military organization and planning to carry out terrorist attacks in the West Bank, senior Jordanian sources told the London-based daily Al-Hayat in a report published on Sunday.
Two of the suspects were charged with receiving military training in Gaza after participating in an organized visit there. According to the sources, “these two young men tried to train other Muslim Brotherhood members in order to carry out operations in the occupied West Bank.”
They also raised money to buy weapons.
The name of senior Turkish-based Hamas official and former prisoner in Israel, Saleh al-Arouri, also came up in the investigation, according to the sources.
However, Arouri claimed over the weekend that he has nothing to do with the Jordanian investigation, according to the report. Arouri said “our resistance” is focused on “Palestine” and “the Zionist occupation.”
This report comes after the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and the IDF thwarted a large, transnational Hamas terrorism network that was preparing to carry out an array of attacks against Israelis, the domestic intelligence agency announced last month.
Some 30 Hamas members have been arrested in raids led by the IDF’s Duvdevan undercover unit.
The network planned to target the Teddy soccer stadium and the light rail system in the capital, to carry out car bombings and kidnappings of Israelis in Judea and Samaria as well as overseas, the Shin Bet said.
The nerve center of the network was situated in Hamas’s headquarters in Turkey, the Shin Bet added.
Jordan arrested the deputy head of the country’s Muslim Brotherhood last month for criticizing the United Arab Emirate’s move to designate the Islamist political movement and its local affiliates a terrorist group, official sources said.
Zaki Bani Rushaid was detained shortly after a late night meeting at the party’s headquarters in Amman, marking the first arrest of a major political opposition figure in Jordan in recent years.
The state security prosecutor general ordered his arrest on charges of “souring relations with a friendly country” after he wrote an opinion column attacking the Gulf state’s role in a regional crackdown on political Islam, the sources said.
Content is provided courtesy of the Jerusalem Post