04 August 2016•Update: 04 August 2016
By Laith Junaidi
AMMAN
The man responsible for a deadly June attack on an office associated with Jordan's intelligence agency near capital Amman was sentenced to death by a Jordanian court on Thursday.
According to Jordan's official Petra news agency, State Security Court Attorney-General Ziad Adwan said the primary defendant, Mahmoud Hassan Masharfeh, had received the death sentence for his role in the attack.
A second defendant, Sami Abdul Rauf Jabr Abu Omar, was sentenced to one year in prison, the news agency reported.
On June 6, armed gunmen attacked an office associated with Jordan’s intelligence agency located in the Baqaa camp for Palestinian refugees in northern Amman.
In the immediate wake of the attack, which occurred at 7 a.m. local time, a government spokesman said three intelligence officers and two employees working at the office had been killed.
Since then, few details about Masharfeh’s identity have been made public. But according to reports in the pan-Arab media, Masharfeh, born in 1994, was actively involved with a number of Jordan-based Jihadi Salafist groups.
The Arabic-language news media has also reported that Masharfeh was detained by the Jordanian authorities in 2012 for promoting "Jihad" for Al-Qaeda and a second time -- only one week before the June 6 attack -- for promoting "Daesh ideology" in Amman’s Baqaa camp.
