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Jordan arrests 40 Islamists as election campaign starts

Arab World Materials 10 October 2010 18:14 (UTC +04:00)
The Jordanian authorities detained 40 members of the country's main opposition group, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), the IAF said Sunday, just as campaigning for November 9 elections got underway, dpa reported.
Jordan arrests 40 Islamists as election campaign starts

The Jordanian authorities detained 40 members of the country's main opposition group, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), the IAF said Sunday, just as campaigning for November 9 elections got underway, dpa reported.

"Such a move runs counter to assurances made by the prime minister (Samir Rifai) that he was keen on preserving an atmosphere of democracy and freedom ahead of the polls," the IAF said in a statement posted on its website.

The detainees, all of them University of Jordan students, were visiting one of their professors in Madaba, 30 kilometres west of Amman, when security men broke into the farm where they were gathered Saturday night and arrested them, the IAF said.

Security sources said that the detainees had been involved in attempts to encourage people to boycott the elections. The accusations were denied by the president of the IAF's consultative council, Ali Abul Sukkar.

"The government is again targeting the Islamic movement in the country," Abul Sukkar said in a statement.

The IAF and its mother group, the Muslim Brotherhood movement, have decided to boycott the upcoming elections, citing the government's failure to provide adequate assurances that the polling process "will not be rigged" as happened in 2007.

The state-funded National Centre for Human Rights acknowledged then that certain "irregularities" had been detected in the polling process.

The IAF returned only six deputies in the 2007 polls, compared with 17 in the previous elections.

King Abdullah II dissolved the lower house of parliament in November 2009, two years before the completion of its four-year term, amid reports that the chamber had failed to perform its supervisory and legislative functions.

The government has since adopted a new temporary election law that seeks to plug loopholes in the previous legislation, foremost vote buying.

However, the IAF and the Brotherhood have insisted on the adoption of a new election law, including a system of proportional representation in the House of Representatives.

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