Death in Amman

In the dusty streets of the Jordanian capital of Amman, men, camels and motors jostled one another. On the sidewalk, scribes at low desks wrote out petitions for illiterate Bedouins bound for the Prime Minister's weekly audience for the public. Then, at midmorning, an explosion . rained debris on the terrified town.

In his quarters on the second floor of the Foreign Ministry building, jovial Premier Hazza Majali, 44, one of the West's best friends in the Arab world, was killed instantly by a huge bomb that burst in his desk drawer.

At his hilltop palace 15 minutes away, Jordan's young King Hussein got the whispered word by telephone. The doughty little king, at 24, is a veteran survivor of assassination plots, attempted coups, and a four-year feud with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. At 13, lie was standing at his Grandfather Abdullah's side when a Palestinian fanatic shot and killed the old King before a mosque. His first and characteristic impulse last week was to rush straight to the scene. Aides urged him to wait. Even as they argued, a second bomb went off at the Premier's office. Total casualties: eleven dead, 43 wounded.

Collecting the Pay. Not to be denied, Hussein inspected the scene from a hovering helicopter. Then he named his personal Cabinet chief, Bahjat Talhuni, 49, as the new Premier and went on the air to tell his people that Majali and the other dead were "victims of aggression and stabbing in the back." That afternoon crowds applauded and cheered the young King as he rode through Amman. "I have lost an elder brother," he said of Majali--and wept.

Next day Hussein told a press conference that "responsible authorities in the United Arab Republic, mainly in Syria," knew in advance of the plot to assassinate Majali. As long ago as last spring, the Jordanian government accused young Playboy General Ali Abu Nuwar, 38, Hussein's onetime buddy as army chief of staff, of planning Majali's assassination from his exile in Nasser's Damascus.

Looking tired and tense, the King said that two minor Jordanian government employees had crossed the border into Syria just before the bombings, and Jordan now demanded that they be sent back. If they were not, he said, Jordan would seek satisfaction in the Arab League or the U.N.

On Vacation. The outrage in Amman brought a quick end to the brief truce that had been established between Hus sein and Nasser a week earlier at an Arab League meeting in Lebanon. Jordan police arrested an Amman bookshop owner named Salah el Saffadi, who was said to have confessed that the explosives used to murder Majali had arrived at his bookstall from Syria innocuously labeled "press material." The two fugitive employees had dragged the bombs into the office building in suitcases the night before and set the fuses. One left the country by midnight. The other, said police, coolly collected his monthly paycheck at 8:30 a.m. before departing for what he said was his "vacation."

Once again the Middle Eastern air was filled with angry Arabrhetoric. Radio Amman cried that Damascus is "the den of all conspiracies," and Cairo's Voice of the Arabs countered that "Majali's death is not the end but the beginning. Heads of treason will fall one by one."

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