Police investigating death of family burned in vehicle

AMMAN — Police are questioning relatives in connection with the death of four family members who were burned in their vehicle on Friday in east Amman, official sources said Saturday.

The Civil Defence Department (CDD) was called to extinguish a burning vehicle that was parked in a deserted area in Beidah at 4:30pm on Friday, a senior official source said.

“When firefighters extinguished the fire they found four bodies, most of them burnt beyond recognition,” a senior CDD official said.

The victims included the 33-year-old father, the 30-year-old mother, who was seven months pregnant, and two children aged five years and nine months, the senior source said.

Two other children survived the burning incident and were listed in fair condition, the CDD official told The Jordan Times.

The surviving daughters informed investigators that a fight erupted between their parents and that their father allegedly “poured a flammable substance that engulfed the vehicle”, the official source said, quoting initial investigations by the authorities.

The source added that one day before the incident, the mother filed a report “against her husband at the Family Protection Department claiming to have been physically abused on a regular basis”.

A government autopsy conducted by pathologists Adnan Abbas, Munther Lutfi and Omar Mahsiri concluded that the four died of a result of various degrees of burns to their bodies, a medical source told The Jordan Times.

The criminal lab took samples from the scene to determine the source of the flammable substance and to look for other evidence that could help police in their investigation, the medical source added.