A BRITISH holidaymaker was shot dead and five other Westerners injured when a lone gunman opened fire on a tour party visiting a Roman amphitheatre in the Jordanian capital Amman yesterday.

Witnesses said that the death toll would have been much higher had the gunman’s pistol not jammed as he tried to reload. He was then overpowered by locals.

Two British women were among those wounded in what Jordanian ministers described as a terror attack deliberately aimed at harming Westerners.

Jordanian officials have named the dead Briton as Christopher Stokes, 30.

One of the injured, Karen Sparke, said that she had “a very lucky escape”.

Ms Sparke described the ambush to BBC News 24 last night from her hospital bed. With her arm in a sling, she said: “We were walking up some stairs at the amphitheatre and I thought I heard a firecracker behind us. We turned around and saw this man pointing a gun at us and I got shot.”

She remembered seeing a number of friends in the tour party lying on the ground. “I went up the steps a bit further and I realised I was bleeding all over. Then a really nice man from a shop came and told us to hide in his store.”

Saher Zarou, who runs a clothes shop, told The Times: “I wiped blood coming from the back of one woman and from the thighs of two others before police came and drove them to the hospital.”

Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, who was in Amman, visited the injured in al-Bashir hospital. She said that she was “extremely saddened” by the shooting.

Last night she went on to Baghdad on an unannounced visit, her first trip to Iraq since becoming Foreign Secretary.

British diplomats said that it was not yet clear whether the attacker had deliberately picked out this mainly British party or had simply fired on the first tour group that he saw.

A New Zealander, an Australian and a Dutch holidaymaker were also among the injured, along with a policeman who was escorting the group after security had been tightened around tourists.

Police were questioning the alleged gunman last night. He is a father of five who comes from the same Jordanian town as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed in a US attack on his hideout in June.

Times Recommends

• Fish and chip shops ‘selling cobbler as cod’
• T in the Park festival at Kinross
• How to get Madonna’s Thighs