AMMAN, Aug 19: Rockets were fired at two US warships in Jordan’s Red Sea Aqaba port on Friday, but missed their targets and killed a Jordanian soldier on land. The three Katyusha missiles instead landed on a warehouse, a hospital and the neighbouring Israeli port of Eilat.

A Jordanian security source said authorities were searching for three men after the attack, which was launched from an industrial warehouse area.

“We are searching for a Syrian and two Iraqis who are in Aqaba and used Kuwaiti (car) number plates,” the source said. Another source said the warehouse from which the rockets were launched had been leased a few days ago by three Iraqis and an Egyptian.

A group claiming links to Al Qaeda, the Abdullah al-Azzam Brigades of the Al Qaeda Organization in the Levant and Egypt, said in a statement it had carried out the attack.

The statement could not be authenticated and was carried on a website not often used by other groups which say they are linked to Osama bin Laden’s network.

Jordanian security forces cordoned off Aqaba and its industrial zone, the sources said, but the port, a logistics hub for Iraq used by the US military and for moving commodities, was operating normally. The incident was the most serious attack on US targets in close ally Jordan since the killing of US diplomat Lawrence Foley in Amman in 2002.

Immediately after the attack, the two US amphibious assault ships, which had been on a joint training exercise with the Jordanian navy, weighed anchor and headed for the safety of open water.

Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz said “one or two” Katyusha rockets had fallen in the airport and hotel area of Eilat, which is about 9 km across the Red Sea from Aqaba, but no one was hurt.

The US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain said one missile narrowly missed the USS Ashland, an amphibious warfare ship that is designed to transport marines and to launch assault landing craft and helicopters.

“I can confirm that a rocket flew over the bow of USS Ashland and the rocket impacted in the roof of a warehouse. No sailors or marines were injured,” Commander Jeff Breslau of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain saide.—Reuters