AMMAN, Jordan — Suicide bombers carried out nearly simultaneous attacks on three Western chain hotels here Wednesday night, killing at least 57 people, wounding more than 100 and emphatically ending Jordan's status as an oasis of relative calm in the Middle East.
The blasts struck the Grand Hyatt, Radisson SAS and Days Inn in the Jordanian capital just before 9 p.m., sending clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky and leaving some of the bloodied victims lying on plush-carpeted floors.
At the Radisson, an assailant detonated an explosives belt in the midst of a wedding party in a crowded banquet hall, resulting in extensive casualties, officials said. At the Days Inn, a car bomber was unable to breach the security perimeter outside the hotel before detonating his explosives, Deputy Prime Minister Marwan Muasher told reporters.
Emergency workers rushing to the scenes used bellman's carts to carry the wounded out of the hotels. The flood of victims overwhelmed local hospitals.
A surgeon at Istiqlal Hospital reported "bodies coming left and right." Sixteen corpses were placed in a single room and dozens of the injured were in danger of dying overnight, the surgeon said.
No group claimed immediate responsibility for the bombings, but Western intelligence officials said the multiple, tightly coordinated suicide attacks focusing on relatively soft targets bore the hallmark of the Al Qaeda network. Muasher, in an interview on CNN, said that although it was too early to tell for sure, he believed Al Qaeda-affiliated Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi was "obviously the prime suspect."
Early reports indicated that the majority of the victims Wednesday were Jordanian civilians. The injured included Moustapha Akkad, the internationally famed Syrian-born film director of "The Message" and "Lion of the Desert." Akkad's 30-year-old daughter, Reem, died in one of the blasts.
Madison Conoley, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Amman, said no American citizens were known to have been injured. Associated Press reported that an American at the Hyatt, speaking with a Southern drawl, had said, "My friends are dead." The blast shattered the entrance to the five-star hotel.
Reuters quoted a French U.N. official as saying, "I was eating with friends in the restaurant next to the bar when I saw a huge ball of fire shoot up to the ceiling and then everything went black."
