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May 25, 1998, was a pleasant spring morning. As it was a public holiday—Jordanian Independence Day—I was at home, working out on the treadmill, when the telephone rang. It was my uncle, Prince Hassan, calling from the Police Crisis Management Center. “How good are you at taking terrorists alive?” he asked. “Not very,” I said. “My unit is trained to kill them.” “Well, we have a major problem in Sahab,” he said, referring to a small town outside Amman. “It’s either you or the police.” I threw on my uniform and headed for the door.

Early that year, Jordan had been terrorized by a series of brutal murders in wealthy neighborhoods of Amman. In January, eight Iraqis had been killed at a villa in Rabia, and in April three Jordanians had been killed in Shmeisani. A prominent doctor had been killed simply because he showed up at the wrong house when one of these murders was taking place. Rumor varied as to whether the murders were the work of terrorists, drug gangs, or petty criminals. The police had tracked down two of the members of the gang they thought responsible, a hit man and his accomplice, and had them trapped in a house in Sahab. Senior officials thought it was important to capture these men alive. They wanted to know for certain whether the murders were inspired by foreign sources and to assure a frightened and skeptical public that they had caught the killers. The previous night the police had gone up to the house at 1 a.m. They knocked on the door, and the criminals opened fire, wounding a policeman. The police fired back, and in the exchange of bullets that followed, the hit man’s accomplice was killed. Since then the police had kept him trapped in the house.

I activated the 71st Battalion, which was highly trained in counterterrorism operations, and within minutes they were suited up and ready to go. I was accompanied by my aide-de-camp, Nathem Rawashdeh, an officer from the town of Kerak, about ninety miles south of Amman. As the battalion did not have enough body armor, Nathem and I stopped by the office to pick up some newly arrived samples of Russian-made body armor, and then drove at full speed to rejoin our unit. We met up with the rest of the battalion at a roundabout on the outskirts of town and headed into the center. The tires of the jeep screeched as we skidded around the final corner and stopped in the town square, which was crowded with people.

As my troops were piling out of their vans and assembling their guns and equipment, I asked who was in charge. A short policeman, who was quite aggressive, told me that this was his operation. “Look,” I said, “I’ve been sent by Prince Hassan with orders to take over this operation. He told me I’m to take the terrorist alive. So please stand down.” After a heated argument, he finally gave way, and I was now in charge.

Standard operating procedure would have been for the police to clear the area and create a secure cordon even if we were in the middle of a town, surrounded by panicked people and curious onlookers. But this was not done, and I had no choice but to make the best of a messy situation.

“So,” I said at last, “how far up the street is this man?” The policeman pointed to a house no more than ten yards away on the other side of the street. There is no way we should have been standing unprotected this close to a known killer. We all scrambled for cover in a sewing shop across the street. It had a large glass window looking out over the square that made us quite vulnerable. One of my men, Jamal Shawabkeh, who later headed Special Operations Command, was leading the assault team. He lived in Sahab and had been one of the first on the scene. After briefing me on the situation, Jamal said, “Now that we’re in charge, let’s storm the building and kill him. It will take five minutes.” I told him no, that we had to take the man alive. I explained that those were my orders, so that he could stand trial for his crimes. We would have to try to capture him alive, even if it meant some of us getting killed.