Wedding guests among dead in Jordan blasts

AMMAN - Amman's Hyatt hotel, frequented by foreign businessmen, journalists and contractors working in Iraq, was packed with guests and a young crowd celebrating a wedding when a bomb tore through the lobby on Wednesday.

A flash of fire followed by a powerful boom shook the foundations of the large, luxury hotel shortly before 9pm, sending glass and brick flying and bringing down part of the ceiling in the gilt and marble entrance hall, witnesses said.

Two other blasts, possibly also caused by suicide bombers, targeted two other international hotels in the Jordanian capital at around the same time, killing at least 57 people and wounding around 115 others, Jordanian government officials said.

CNN reported 67 had died.

"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," said a French United Nations official who was eating at the Hyatt at the time of the blast.

"It caused absolute devastation. The bar was definitely the target, but the whole lobby was packed with people."

He said he expected both foreigners and Jordanians, particularly hotel staff, to be among those wounded or killed, but hotel officials and Jordanian authorities said they did not yet have any details on the nationality of the victims.

Scores of hotel guests and dozens of well-dressed young people celebrating the wedding fled the building in panic after the attack, some pulling or dragging wounded and bleeding friends and relatives behind them, screaming for help.

Some of the worst wounded, including a young woman sprayed by shrapnel across her legs and back and apparently paralysed, were left lying on an outdoor terrace at the back of the hotel as people escaped down fire escapes.

One young waiter, whose hotel name tag identified him as Mustafa, lay on his back on the hotel's back steps, apparently lifeless, as hotel guests tried to resuscitate him.

"I saw at least five people dead," said Thamer Kadum, an Iraqi doctor who arrived in Amman on Wednesday to take a few days break from Baghdad, where bomb attacks are all too common.

"One of them was my friend. I tried to help them, but it was too late for them. There were so many badly injured people." Ambulances, overloaded by the fact that three attacks occurred across the city at the same time, took more than 20 minutes to arrive and so guests helped carry the wounded from the scene on blankets, laying them out on the pavement.

A young woman, dressed in smart clothes and high heels for the wedding, sat bleeding from her hands and head and screaming in disbelief as a young man lay on the ground next to her, his leg twisted underneath him at an unnatural angle.

"Get help, get help," she screamed in English and Arabic as guests and locals tried desperately to call for ambulances.

One man, an American who was in the bar when the bomb went off, said he was sure it had detonated either inside or next to a grand piano standing in the centre of the bar area.

He stood outside afterwards holding a bandage to the back of his head, stunned by his lucky escape.

The hotel's European managers gathered the scores of guests at the back of the building afterwards and arranged for everyone to stay at another luxury hotel nearby. Some refused to go, fearing a repeat attack.

- REUTERS