Attempt on life of Jordanian police chief's wife seen as warning by al-Qa'ida

The bomb was a warning to King Abdullah's security services. No one puts an explosive device in a car belonging to the wife of Jordan's top "anti-terrorist" police by chance.

So when it blew up in Amman yesterday, killing two luckless food shop workers who happened to be passing, the finger of suspicion pointed, as it was bound to, in the direction of Osama bin Laden.

For 28 men said to be associated with Mr bin Laden's al-Qa'ida movement were sentenced in Jordan two years ago for planning attacks on American and Israeli targets in the country during the Millennium celebrations; the investigation was led by Lt-Col Ali Burjak of the "Anti-Terrorism Unit" – and it was the Toyota belonging to Lt-Col Burjak's wife, Yasmin, that exploded yesterday.

The bomb was poorly made, according to the police – not a hallmark of Mr bin Laden – but it was set off by a timer at the moment Yasmin Burjak normally leaves her home in the Jebel Amman district of the capital.

Of the 28 men sentenced in 2000, six were condemned to death, six were acquitted and the rest received between seven and a half and 15 years in prison with hard labour. So when a senior Jordanian intelligence officer stated yesterday that "this appears to be a message to the Jordanian security apparatus at this crucial time'', he was probably right.

Although Jordan has a good crime record, any violence tends to cause fears that might seem to an outsider quite out of proportion. Attacks on Iraqi and Israeli citizens – and there have been several in recent years – have serious implications in a state that borders Iraq and where Palestinians make up more than half the population.

The attempted murder of a Hamas official by an Israeli death squad in the late 1990s proved that Israel was prepared to kill in the territory of a country with which it had signed a peace treaty.

But violence can also come from the street. In February, rioters set fire to the police station in the southern Jordanian town of Maan during five hours of rioting in which guns were fired at the police and passing cars.

The crowd of hundreds was protesting at the death of a 17-year-old Islamic student called Sulieman Fanatfeh, who had been arrested by police and was then taken to hospital – mysteriously suffering from what the Interior Ministry claimed was "extreme exhaustion'' – where he died.

"Extreme exhaustion" may well be what anyone questioned by the Jordanian police is likely to suffer from. But in the Sulieman's pocket, according to one resident of Maan, the police had found a photograph of Osama bin Laden.