'Dangerous Islamist fugitive' who is only a phone call away

If you believe the Jordanian police, Mohamed al-Chalabi is a dangerous Islamist who was arrested at a police checkpoint after the American diplomat Laurence Foley was murdered, who fled but was later wounded in a shoot-out with security forces and is now on the run.

But MrChalabi is a just a phone call away. Far from being on the run, he was yesterday morning sitting, wounded, in his father's home in the Jordanian city of Maan, telling me on the phone a far more convincing story than the version given by the Jordanian authorities. And the real story – that King Abdullah of Jordan's police appear too frightened to enter the city to arrest him – says a lot about Jordan.

After Mr Foley was gunned down in the garden of his Amman home, the Jordanian authorities began rounding up Islamists across Jordan. "Scores," according to the bearded Mr Chalabi.

The Associated Press news agency reported that he was "sought in an attack on a police station last year" – Mr Chalabi denies this – and was "apprehended after a shoot-out with police". He later escaped from hospital after being wounded, the agency said, basing its report on the word of an "official".

A likely story. MrChalabi, who is still recovering from the two bullets the police fired into his right shoulder, seemed pretty composed when he talked to me from his father's home.

According to him, he was driving his 34-year-old wife, Wasiya, who is crippled, to Amman for medical treatment. "We were near the town of Qatrani when we were stopped," he told me.

"It was a police patrol with two plainclothes men. When they looked at my papers, they said I would have to go to the security office in Qatrani, that I might be detained. They do this to anyone who has a tribal beard."

Mr Chalabi had no interest in being detained and reversed his car, speeding back towards the tribal city of Maan, whose 30,000 inhabitants have long supported the Islamist cause and who have been involved in street protests against Jordan's peace agreement with Israel.

"Another checkpoint fired at me and I drove on and, at the last checkpoint before Maan, they had driven lorries across the road to block me. I turned off on to a dirt road in the desert to avoid them and my wife was knocked unconscious on the roof because the car was bouncing so much."

The moment Mr Chalabi jumped out of the car, the police opened fire on him again, this time hitting him twice.

"The people of Maan were standing at the checkpoint – including the lorry drivers who have been blocking the road," he said. "They got me into a car and took me to hospital and, once I'd been treated, I went to my father's home."

At which point, he was safe. The Jordanian police, it seems, will not enter Maan, about 170 miles south of Amman.

"We are a tribal town which refuses oppression and refuses to hand its sons to the 'relatives' of the Americans," he says.

So is it true that the King's writ does not run in Maan? It seems so. For if it does, how come I could talk to Mohamed al-Chalabi yesterday?