Fugitive Jordanian national Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was at the centre of pre-war US efforts to establish a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, has emerged as chief suspect in the deadly bombing of Jordan's Baghdad embassy.
Two months before Washington went to war in Iraq, US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN Security Council that Saddam was linked to al-Qaeda - allegations that hinged on the one-legged Zarqawi, a veteran of Osama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan.
Now Jordanian and US officials say the 36-year-old Zarqawi is their chief suspect in Thursday's embassy bombing which killed 13 people and wounded more than 50 in the deadliest attack in Iraq since Baghdad's fall on April 9.
Zarqawi, whose real name is Fadel Nazzal al-Khalayleh, fled to Iraq in 2002 and is accused of working with a Kurdistan-based Islamic militant group, Ansar al-Islam, which Washington says is linked to al-Qaeda.
"The style of the attack and the explosives used, point towards Ansar al-Islam and in particular to Zarqawi, who is still on the run in Iraq," a senior Jordanian official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
"Zarqawi blames Jordan for giving the United States information on his terror network and a secret Ansar al-Islam camp in northern Iraq, which makes him one of the chief suspects in this attack," the official said.
US forces conducted a devastating air and ground assault on Ansar bases in in northern Iraq in April amid accusations that the group was working with Baghdad and al-Qaeda to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Amman also accuses Zarqawi of plotting the murder of US diplomat Laurence Foley, 62, who was gunned down outside his home in the Jordanian capital on October 28, 2002.
Jordanian intelligence agents investigating the Foley killing, tracked Zarqawi down to northern Iraq.
Amman alleges that he recruited the diplomat's killers, a Libyan and a fellow Jordanian, giving them weapons, and trying without success, to equip them with missiles for further attacks.
The accusations against Zarqawi came as Washington renewed its wartime charges that al-Qaeda had sought to acquire chemical and biolgical weapons from Saddam Hussein.
A report released by the White House Friday cited a senior al-Qaeda detainee as saying that Zarqawi had come to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, along with two dozen al-Qaeda militants.
"This group stayed in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq and plotted terrorist attacks around the world," the report said.
Pentagon officials confirmed Thursday that the US military was focusing attention on the Ansar al-Islam in its own inquiry into the embassy bombing.
Last weekend, US civil administration Paul Bremer said he had "clear evidence of an al-Qaeda related terrorist group, the Ansar al-Islam, reconstituting its capabilities inside of Iraq since the war."
Zarqawi left his family home in Zarqa, an impoverished town 25 kilometres (16 miles) east of Amman, as a young man for Afghanistan, where he was trained in al-Qaeda camps and fought against the Soviet occupation.
In 1999, he fled his homeland shortly before Amman busted an al-Qaeda-linked terror cell, and in October 2000, 28 members of the network were put on trial and he was sentenced, in absentia, to 15 years in prison.
A member of the Bani Hassan, one of Jordan's largest tribes, he lost a leg during fighting with US forces in the US-led war to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan in late 2001.
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