Iraqis botch plot to poison U.S. troops
JORDAN ARRESTS AGENTS WHO ALLEGEDLY TRIED TO CONTAMINATE WATER TANK
By Alan Feuer
New York Times via MercuryNews.com, The Mercury News, http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/2003/04/02/news/world/5539107.htm.
AMMAN, Jordan - Jordanian authorities have arrested Iraqi agents in connection with a botched plot to poison the water supply that serves U.S. troops in the eastern desert near the border with Iraq, officials said Tuesday. The small group of men embarked on a scheme to poison a water tank that supplies hundreds of U.S. soldiers at a military base in Khao, which lies in an arid region of the eastern frontier near the industrial town of Zarqa. It was unclear how close they actually came to contaminating the water supply, but no one was sickened or injured, the officials said.
There was scant information about the plot Tuesday, although officials said it was connected to the expulsion late last month of three Iraqi diplomats, who were expelled from Jordan for undermining its national security. Officials at the Iraqi Embassy, which has been all but cut off from Baghdad because of the war, were not available for comment.
In a separate incident, Western diplomats said Tuesday that four other Iraqi men were detained last week in a bungled plan to set fire to a luxury hotel in Amman where many U.S. journalists and some U.S. military personnel are staying. The four, who are believed to be Iraqi intelligence officers, tried to burn down the top-floor executive lounge of the Grand Hyatt Amman Hotel with a primitive incendiary bomb, but the hotel's sprinkler system extinguished the flames....(/snip)
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