Jordan Says 11 Plotted a Series of Attacks

Samih Maayta, the Jordanian minister for media and communication, said in an interview that the group had been staking out locations for months and planning to use car bombs, machine guns and other heavy weapons in an attack that could have killed hundreds of citizens and foreigners. The group, apparently made up of Jordanians, called itself 11-9 the Second, referring to a string of hotel bombings in Amman that killed 60 people on Nov. 9, 2005.

Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate “had all their activities under surveillance,” Mr. Maayta said. “The group’s experiments concentrated on creating explosives that would do the maximum damage and cause the highest losses.”

Jordan is an important ally of the United States and has a peace treaty with Israel, its neighbor. A spokesman for the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel declined to comment on Sunday evening about whether Israeli intelligence had assisted the Jordanian authorities in the case.

Mr. Maayta said that the group had traveled to Syria and was planning to take advantage of the chaos there to obtain weapons, including TNT, which they planned to add to existing explosives to increase their power. He said the group had taken “counsel from Al Qaeda in Iraq via the terrorist sites on the Internet,” and had posted their plans online “to enable others to be able to create the same explosives.”

Most of the targets of the plot were said to be in the affluent Abdoun neighborhood in the southern part of Amman, home to several upscale nightclubs that are popular with young Jordanians and tourists. The plans apparently included suicide bombers, exploding cars, machine-gun fire and tossed grenades.

“They were targeting foreign diplomats in hotels and in public places,” Mr. Maayta said. “They were starting to target two main malls.”

He said the intelligence service seized weapons, computers, cameras and forged documents in connection with the arrests.