AMMAN (AP/Middle East Eye) – Three police officers were killed in a restive area of southern Jordan on Monday while trying to arrest suspects in last week’s slaying of a police commander. The main suspect was also killed in the gunbattle, authorities said.
The shootout took place near the town of Maan, where Abdul Razzaq Abdel Hafez al-Dalabeh, a local deputy police director, was killed last week. The region is an impoverished and marginalized area of the country with high unemployment. In the past, there were expressions of support for the Daesh terrorists in the area.
Jordanian police said nine suspects were arrested, allegedly members of what they called a terrorist cell with “takfiri ideology,” a term used to describe extremists.
The Public Security Directorate said officers surrounded the location of the suspects in the killing of the commander. One suspect “fired heavy bullets from an automatic weapon,” and the officers returned fire, the statement also said. It added that officers seized “automatic firearms and a large amount of ammunition.”
The arrests followed some of the worst unrest the kingdom has seen in recent years, after truck drivers launched a strike over soaring fuel prices. Strikes and protests spread to several cities across Jordan and demonstrators clashed with police last Thursday.
Jordanian authorities temporarily suspended access to TikTok on Friday, with many users complaining that they could not access it.
The cybercrimes unit of the PSD said that it had suspended the platform because of what it described as “misuse by its users, whether by glorifying violence, calls for chaos, promoting videos from outside the kingdom and falsifying them to influence the feelings of citizens”.
Since the beginning of the year, the government has raised the price of diesel six times, and five times for petrol, although it brought down the cost of the latter twice in the past two months.
It began gradually removing all subsidies on fuel and regularly increasing taxes in 2017, as part of conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund with the aim of ending subsidies.
In another development, truck drivers in Jordan’s Maan signed an agreement with lawmakers to end a 17-day strike that has seen major disruption to traffic and supply chains and the death of a senior police officer.
Under the deal, which was signed by six members of parliament, the drivers agreed to evacuate main highways and go back to work under a pledge that their demands would be met.
The workers — most of whom hail from the southern cities of Maan, Tafileh and Karak — have demanded lower fuel prices and the cancellation of a special tax on fuel derivatives.