Fatal Jordan police compound shooting took place in canteen

A policeman in Jordan has killed five people – including two Americans, two South Africans and a Jordanian – at a police training centre.

Jordan is part of a US-led coalition battling ISIS, which has seized swathes of territory in its neighbours Syria and Iraq.

“There’s a huge reservoir of opposition” to the Syrian regime, Schenker said, along with a latent anti-Americanism that has grown since 2000, as U.S.-Jordan ties have intensified.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the the two contractors killed by the gunman worked for DynCorp global, which conducts worldwide security training, under a USA program.

The three dead trainers were all civilians on contract with the Jordanian police, officials said.

Fayez Dwairi, a strategic analyst and former senior military officer, said he could not recall such a deadly shooting attack inside a Jordanian security compound in his 36 years in the military. Four Jordanians and one Lebanese citizen were wounded.

Jordan hosts several hundred US contractors, including the stationing of F-16 fighter jets that use Jordanian airfields to attack ISIL targets in neighboring Syria.

A statement from the Royal Court said King Abdullah II had visited the wounded at the Hussein Medical Center in Amman.

The motive for Monday’s attack was not immediately known, and an investigation is underway. One report said that he had asked to be decommissioned last month.

Al-Qaeda’s branch in Iraq said it carried out the 2005 attacks in retaliation for Jordan’s pro-Western policies.

The incident yesterday occurred in a facility that mainly trains Iraqi and Palestinian forces on the outskirts of the capital Amman.

He says, “Government has informed the next of kin of about the incident and we will make arrangements with the family as well as Jordanian officials on the process that will follow the bad news”.

Pentagon spokesman Major James Brindle told Al Jazeera that the Pentagon was trying to verify the information, adding that he could not yet confirm the identity of the two dead Americans.

“Obviously, a full investigation is taking place”, President Obama said in the Oval Office this morning with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The US government has used the police training center in Muwaqqer, about 30 kilometers from Amman, in cooperation with Jordan, to train tens of thousands of police cadets from the Middle East.