U.S. offers $5 million bounty on embassy bomb suspect
August attack in Baghdad left 16 dead
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Abu Musab al Zarqawi fled Afghanistan in 2002, according to the Bush administration.
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CNN's Harris Whitbeck on the Jordanian Embassy attack in Baghdad.
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Under its "Rewards for Justice" program, the State Department on Wednesday posted a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the capture of Abu Musab al Zarqawi -- a Jordanian with ties to al Qaeda and suspected of orchestrating the August bombing of Jordan's embassy in Baghdad.
Zarqawi is also being tried in absentia for last year's killing of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman, Jordan.
The offer appeared Wednesday on the Rewards for Justice Web site, affiliated with the State Department, but erroneously listed the reward amount as $25 million. The State Department said Thursday that was a mistake, and the reward is up to $5 million.
According to the Web site, Zarqawi "has had a long-standing connection to senior [al Qaeda] leadership and appears to be highly regarded among" the terror network.
He is also described as a close associate of bin Laden and al Qaeda military leader Saif al-Adel, who U.S. intelligence officials believe is being sheltered in Iran.
Zarqawi has been named by the Bush administration as an al Qaeda terrorist who fled to Iraq from Afghanistan in May 2002 for medical treatment and then stayed to organize terror plots with Ansar al-Islam -- a radical Islamic group -- which operated a training camp in northern Iraq that came under coalition control during the U.S.-led war.
Prior to his stays in Afghanistan and Iraq, Zarqawi lived in Jordan, leaving in 1999, and has been wanted by the Jordanian government on terror charges for some time.
Zarqawi is the suspected mastermind of the August 7 attack on the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, which killed at least 16 people, including five Iraqi guards, and wounded dozens more.
Shortly before Foley was killed last year, prosecutors say Zarqawi slipped into Jordan, set the assassination plot in progress, and then returned to Iraq.
Foley, a senior administrative officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Jordan, was gunned down in front of his Amman house on October 28, 2002.
