Controversial Islamist preacher Abu Qatada, who was deported from Britain to Jordan in 2013, said today that his 23-year-old son has been arrested in Amman by Jordanian police.
"Men who said they were state security came yesterday to the house and took my son Qatada on the basis of an arrest warrant served against him," Abu Qatada told AFP.
"They searched the house and took his mobile phone and that of his mother, as well as an iPad," the preacher said.
He said he had no idea why his son was detained.
Abu Qatada - once described as the right-hand man in Europe of late Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden - was deported from Britain to Jordan in July 2013 after a 10-year legal fight.
Last year, he was found not guilty by an Amman court of conspiring to attack tourists in Jordan during millenium celebrations, due to insufficient evidence.
Born Omar Mahmud Mohammed Otman in Bethlehem in 1960, the burly father of five was one of the most prominent of a set of extremist preachers based in London in the 1990s and 2000s.
Videotapes of his sermons were allegedly found in the Hamburg flat of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
