The government statement, read on state television, said the suspect, Mohammed Hassan Abdullah al-Sihly, plotted and carried out the attack along with two of his sons and an Iraqi.

The statement said the plotters were part of an Iraq-based terrorist group, which was not named.

Al-Sihly, who lives in Amman, had been surveying sites for the Katyusha rocket attack in Aqaba since Aug. 6, the statement said. He was joined by his two sons - Abdullah and Abdul-Rahman - and Mohammed Hamid Hussein, the Iraqi, in ''carrying out the heinous crime.''

Hussein was the leader of the Iraq-based group, the announcement said.

In the Friday attack, assailants fired three rockets from a window at a warehouse in a poor industrial area of Aqaba, a usually quiet Red Sea resort frequented by Western and Israeli tourists. The warehouse was rented to four Egyptians and Iraqis early last week, police said.

One rocket flew across the bow of a U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship and crashed into a warehouse, killing a Jordanian soldier. Two other missiles flew in another direction, toward Israel; one landed near a Jordanian hospital, the other on the outskirts of an Israeli airport.

The attack was the most serious threat against the U.S. Navy since the 2000 al-Qaida bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. It was also the first attack targeting U.S. personnel in Jordan since the October 2002 killing of an American aid worker outside his Amman home - blamed on Iraq's al-Qaida point man, the Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

An al-Qaida group called the Abdullah Azzam Brigades claimed responsibility for Friday's attack.

The government statement said the four had rented a warehouse in Aqaba, where the rockets were mounted and connected to a timing device.

Al-Sihly's two sons and the Iraqi returned to Iraq hours before the timer launched the rockets, the statement added.