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The Jordanian Government accuses the former heir to the throne of conspiring with foreign forces against King Abdullah

2021-04-04T20:13:28.856Z


Former Queen Noor defends the innocence of her son Prince Hamzah, who is under house arrest in a palace in Amman


The Jordanian government has accused the former crown prince Hamzah bin Hussein, half-brother of King Abdullah II, of conspiring with foreign forces against the monarch and the stability of the country.

After the Army leadership blamed him on Saturday for being involved in a plot against state security, Deputy Prime Minister Ayman Safadi now assures that "communications from Hamzah with a foreign intelligence agency about plans to destabilize have been intercepted. Jordan".

Like almost everything in the Hashemite court, the preventive backlash organized by the

mukhabarat

, intelligence service, during the weekend has a soap opera background.

Jordan has jumped from the pink of the coated paper to the chiaroscuro that surrounds the attempted coup.

With hardly any precedent in peaceful Amman, the raid "for security reasons and a threat to the stability of the country" led to Royals Sharif Hasan bin Zaid and Bassem being dragged into the dungeons and interrogation rooms. Awadallah, former head of the Royal House, former adviser to the monarch and former Minister of Finance, as well as a score of unidentified suspects, including Bedouin tribal chiefs and members of the security forces.

Prince Hamzah, 41, was removed from the dynastic line in 2004, when King Abdullah, 59, appointed his eldest son, Prince Hussein, 26, as his successor.

"Initial investigations show that their activities and movements had reached a level that compromised the security and stability of the state," said the deputy prime minister, quoted by the state news agency Petra.

The intervened contacts indicated, according to the same source, that the crown prince's wife had coordinated with a foreign espionage agency (without revealing the country to which she belongs) a flight out of the country for the couple and their children. .

The Israeli daily

Maariv

reported on Sunday that among those detained in the security operation in Amman was former Mossad (foreign spy) agent Roy Shpushik, who was allegedly organizing the flight out of the country.

The Hashemite monarch finally decided that it was best to resolve the mess as a family matter.

"They spoke directly with Prince Hamzah to prevent him from being manipulated (by third parties)," Safadi justified for the visit made on Saturday by the Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff to the palace of the former heir to the throne in Amman to demand that he abstain of carrying out activities against "the security and stability of Jordan."

The Government denied that he was detained, but the member of the royal family rejected this version.

In a video sent to his lawyer in London before his Internet connection was cut off and broadcast by the BBC on Saturday night, Hamzah assured that he is not part of a coup plot and that he is under house arrest at his residence from Amman following an operation by security forces to crush critical voices from Jordan.

In the recording broadcast by the British network, he accused the country's leaders of "corruption, incompetence and harassment of dissent."

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In the video he also recounted the visit of the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces to inform him that he could not leave his home or communicate or meet with other people: “They told me, without formally accusing me, that in previous meetings I had or in messages in the social networks that described them, criticism had been expressed against the Government and the king ”.

Queen Noor, the last of King Hussein's four wives, and Hamzah's mother defended her son's innocence on Twitter: "I pray that justice prevails for all innocent victims of these perverse slanders."

Abdullah was appointed heir by his father shortly before his death from cancer in 1999. His uncle Hassan, who acted as regent, had until then been first in the line of succession.

In return, Abdullah promised to respect King Hussein's last will and named his half-brother Hamzah as heir to the throne.

Five years later, he invoked the tradition of the Hashemite dynasty to appoint his first-born to the post.

Queen Noor, born in the United States with the name of Lisa Halaby, never hid the ambition that her eldest son would one day be king, but the youth of the prince considered as the favorite of King Hussein, excluded him 22 years ago from the throne in Benefit from his older half-brother Abdullah, well connected with the Armed Forces.

Hamzah had been mostly silent ever since, enjoying the comfortable existence of Hashemite royalty, until the pandemic turned Jordan upside down.

The economic crisis resulting from successive lockdowns and curfews further impoverished a population plagued by unemployment since the beginning, a decade ago, of the war in neighboring Syria, one of Jordan's main trading partners.

Tribal clans

In this climate of recession, discontent soared among the Bedouin tribal clans, which have controlled the springs of power since the constitution of the Emirate of Transjordan, a century ago, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.

Hamzah began attending meetings with dissident tribal chiefs in recent months in which invectives were launched against misgovernment and corruption in the country.

Although the prince remained silent in these meetings, open criticism of Abdullah expressed in public violated the taboo not to question the figure of the king, whose unifying role is essential in the complex Jordanian society, divided between Bedouin and Palestinians;

Muslims and Christians, and secular and Islam, among other fracture failures.

In the raid against the alleged attempted coup, Bassem Awadallah has also been arrested, who between 2007 and 2008 headed the internal Cabinet of the Royal Palace, a body that has broad powers due to its proximity to the monarch.

As finance minister for a short period in 2008, he was the promoter of a controversial program of economic reforms and privatizations that earned him the enmity of the old guard of political and economic power in Amman.

Awadallah was later appointed Jordan's special envoy to Saudi Arabia, where he later became an advisor to the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohamed Bin Salman.

The Government of Riyadh was among the first, in the cascade of reactions in neighboring countries, to express its "full support for King Abdullah to preserve security in Jordan."

Iran and Turkey, among many others, joined the long string of messages of diplomatic solidarity.

The EU also showed its support for King Abdullah.

The US State Department also immediately made public its "full support" for the monarch as a "key ally" in the region.

Nobody seems to want convulsions on the small island of apparent stability that Jordan represents: a buffer state that acts as a keystone between Israel, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and, in short, the Middle East.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-04-04

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