SUICIDE bombers struck at three luxury hotels in Amman yesterday, killing at least 57 people in attacks that bore all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda strike on one of Washington’s closest allies in the Middle East.

The Jordanian capital was thrown into panic by co- ordinated blasts at the Grand Hyatt, Radisson SAS and Days Inn hotels, all popular with Western visitors, businessmen and security contractors on their way to neighbouring Iraq.

Marwan Muasher, Jordan’s Deputy Prime Minister, said that most victims were Jordanians attending a wedding at the Radisson Hotel. A further 117 were injured.

Mr Muasher announced that Jordan was closing all its land borders in the wake of the largest attack on its soil. He said that two suicide bombers, with explosives strapped to their bodies, struck at the Radisson and Grand Hyatt hotels.

The third attack was apparently a car bomb. Mr Muasher said that a car bearing green tourist licence plates and laden with bombs tried to ram into the Days Inn but was thwarted by concrete bollards. Witnesses said that they saw dead bodies in the street — including three Asian men believed to be members of an official delegation.

“Anybody who walks into a wedding hall and blows himself up is not serving Jordan,” Mr Muasher said. “Jordan is a safe country and its security has safeguarded it. This is a despicable act of terrorism and an act of cowardice.”

The bride, Nadia al-Alami, and the groom, Ashraf Mohammad al-Akhras, were wounded, and their fathers killed in the blast. “I lost my father and my father-in-law and I saw many other dead,” Mr al-Akhras said. “This is a horrible crime.”

“We thought it was fireworks for the wedding, but I saw people falling to the ground,” said Ahmed, one of the 300 guests. “I saw blood. There were people killed. It was ugly.”

Caroline Hawley, the BBC’s Baghdad correspondent, who was in the Hyatt while on holiday from Iraq, said that she heard a huge blast. “I saw flashes of orange and glass shattered and then absolute panic with people fleeing out of the hotel,” she said. “It seemed an awful long time before the ambulances arrived.

“Hotel staff were putting people into taxis or private cars, they were simply worried that they wouldn’t live unless they got them to the hospital quickly,” she added.

The British Embassy in Amman said that there were no reports of British casualties.

“It was a miracle that we made it out without a scratch,” said one British guest at the Hyatt, which was the scene of a failed incendiary bomb three years ago.

A group of 15 Iraqi doctors were having dinner at the hotel when the bomb exploded. “At first we thought we were back in Iraq,” one said.

The Radisson, close to the Israeli Embassy and frequently used by Israeli staff and security officials, has also been targeted in the past in plots thwarted by Jordan’s security services.

King Abdullah II of Jordan immediately condemned the blasts and pledged that “justice will pursue the criminals”.

Police sealed off the approach roads to all the hotels, in the affluent Jebel Amman area. There were also reports of arrests, including Syrians.

Until last night Jordan had been spared violence spilling over from neighbouring Iraq. It has long feared that the bloodshed might spur a cross-border jihad as young Arab volunteers from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, North Africa and Jordan itself have become radicalised by the conflict on its eastern border.

Suspicion immediately focused last night on Abu Mu-sab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq who comes from the impoverisged town of Zarqa, near Amman.

There is widespread opposition to King Abdullah’s support for the US-led invasion of Iraq, exacerbating existing tensions among the huge Palestinian population over Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel.

Times Recommends

• Michael Jackson: Not the final chapter
• Indian Army spends10m rupees on golf buggies
• Sacha Baron Cohen forced to tone down Brüno