Jordan’s Information Minister Saleh Al Qallab said on Wednesday that there had been no clues yet on the motives behind the killing of an Israeli diamond merchant in Amman.
“No clues have been found... all options are possible,” Qallab told the Jordan Times. “Any tangible results will be made public immediately,” he added.
He minister said a “settling of accounts” remained the principal hypothesis being pursued.
But the Israeli embassy’s spokesman in Amman, Roey Gilad, did not rule out the possibility of “political or nationalistic motives” behind the killing of Yitzhak Snir.
“We suspect political motives behind the assassination, and we are positive that the Jordanian authorities will carry out a full and serious investigation and will find who was behind this tragic assassination,” Gilad told the paper.
Meanwhile, Snir’s body arrived in Israel on Wednesday following an autopsy conducted by Jordanian doctors.
A team of top forensic experts found that he had been shot eight times, mostly in the back.
Most of the bullets, which were likely fired from a 9mm pistol, penetrated his back and exited from his chest, sources told the paper.
Jordanian authorities barred an Israeli forensic doctor from taking part in the postmortem, a move that angered the Israeli government, said Haaretz newspaper.
“We refused to allow any person to enter the morgue at Al Bashir Hospital, where a four-member Jordanian team checked the body,” one official told the Jordan Times.
The team, who carried out the autopsy under tight security, was headed by the National Forensic Center Director Momen Hadidi.
The victim's family had originally turned down the autopsy request on religious grounds, but dropped their objections after they were persuaded it would help unravel the motives behind the attack.
Two Jordanian groups claimed responsibility for the attack.
Meanwhile, in the occupied Palestinian city of Jerusalem, the Israeli Foreign Ministry warned its citizens against travelling to Jordan or Egypt in the wake of the killing, the first such case in Amman since a peace treaty was signed in 1994.
A similar warning was issued after the start of the latest Palestinian uprising against 34 years of Israeli military occupation.
Anti-Israeli sentiment has been running high across the Arab world since the outbreak of the Intifada. Two unsuccessful assassination attempts have been staged against Israeli diplomats in Amman since the uprising began.
Palestinians estimate that Israel has assassinated over 50 resistance activists in the Occupied Territories in the last several months – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
