by Randa Habib
ALGIERS - Jordan's King Abdullah II ordered the return of Amman's top diplomat to Baghdad as officials from the two neighbouring countries met Monday in the Algerian capital to defuse a diplomatic crisis.
"His Majesty King Abdullah ordered the immediate return of the Jordanian charge d'affaires to Iraq ... as a gesture of goodwill to ease the tension between our countries," Jordanian Prime Minister Faysal al-Fayez told AFP.
He was speaking after a meeting with Iraq's outgoing President Ghazi al-Yawar, while the foreign ministers of Iraq and Jordan, Hoshyar Zebari and Hani Mulki, met separately to contain tensions between their countries.
Jordan on Sunday recalled its charge d'affaires Dimai Haddad from Baghdad, saying it feared for his safety due to anti-Jordan demonstrations over the alleged involvement of a Jordanian in a devastating suicide bombing.
Hours later Baghdad retaliated by recalling its ambassador from Amman, Atta Abdel Wahab, and accused Jordan of not doing enough to help prevent attacks in Iraq.
Yawar also put a brave face as he arrived in Algiers ahead of Fayez, telling reporters that there was "no crisis" with Jordan. "We are brothers and neighbours and the ties between us are bigger than any problem," Yawar said.
Around 300,000 Iraqis live in Jordan, where most of them sought haven after the 1991 Gulf War over Kuwait, and Jordan contributes to Iraqi reconstruction by helping to train Iraqi policemen, army troops and civil servants.
Fayez, who is leading Jordan's delegation to a two-day Arab summit which opens Tuesday in Algeria, described his meeting with Yawar as "excellent".
The Iraqi foreign minister, who sat in on the meeting, "assured me that Iraq's decision to recall its ambassador from Amman was for consultations and should not be seen at all as severing ties", Faysal said.
He said he told Yawar that "terrorism has no nationality and it is impossible that a Jordanian" could carry out an attack such at the suicide bombing that killed 118 people in the Shiite town of Hilla on February 28.
"We have good relations with Iraq and we want these relations to persist," Faysal said. "I hope that this will only be a summer cloud in our relations with Iraq."
The Jordanian prime minister also insisted that the alleged Jordanian perpetrator of the Hilla attack, Raed al-Banna, "was not killed in Hilla".
And he blamed the crisis on newspaper articles which appeared in the Jordanian and Iraqi media claiming that Banna's family in Jordan held a memorial service to honour him as a "martyr".
Banna's family have repeatedly denied he was involved in the attack in Hilla, south of Baghdad.
His father told AFP last week his son had died and was buried in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. He had received a call from an unidentified man telling him his son had died a "martyr" -- without specifying whether as a victim or a perpetrator.
The bombing in Hilla was the deadliest single attack in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein two years ago and Shiite politicians and religious leaders have demanded apologies from Amman.
The attack was claimed by a group run by Al-Qaeda's frontman in Iraq, Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was sentenced to death in Jordan last year for the murder of a US diplomat.

03/21/2005 20:50 GMT