This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

Eight people including four foreign tourists were stabbed on Wednesday inside the ancient Roman city of Jerash, one of Jordan’s most popular sites for visitors.

Authorities said the victims included tourists from Mexico and Switzerland. Police sources told the Guardian that three of those stabbed were Mexican and one was Swiss. The others included two Jordanian police officers, a tour guide and a driver.

A Mexican tourist and a Jordanian tour guide were flown to Amman with serious injuries but their conditions were soon upgraded to stable, the Jordanian health minister, Saad Jaber, told reporters. The rest had injuries “between moderate and slight,” he said.

The perpetrator, a 22-year old, was arrested at the scene and was believed to have acted alone, sources said.

He came from a nearby Palestinian refugee camp housing about 35,000 people and used to wash cars at a station on its borders, said Basheer Abu Serdanah, a resident of the camp who knew the man.

“If he did it, we are all in shock,” Serdanah said. “He was a shy, normal guy. If you talked to him he’d put his eyes to the ground.”

A group representing residents of the camp released a statement on Wednesday saying they “denounce and condemn the terrorist act carried out of by one of these cowards in Jerash.”

Natalie, an American tourist who witnessed the attack, said she and her tour group were close to the Roman city’s hippodrome shortly before 11.16am local time when they saw a large group and heard a commotion.

She said that they realised there were people bleeding: “It looked like there had been a full-on fight. And then I saw this guy’s hand just split open and I knew somebody had stabbed people.”

She said local guides told her and her group that the attack had been carried out by “a psycho” who had been arrested and that the rest of the site was now safe.

“We walked a bit farther down towards the columns and there was a machete lying there,” she said. “There were no police lines set up or anything at the site. People were just walking around and you could walk straight through all the blood.”

She said she counted at least four victims and said three of them appeared to be severely injured.

A video purported to have been shot in the aftermath of the stabbings showed a woman lying face-first on the ground while others pressed a scarf to an apparent wound in her back.

An alarmed woman was heard calling for assistance in Spanish, shouting: “There’s been a stabbing. They’ve got a knife! Please help him here! Please!”

Another man sat nearby with a bloodied leg, and bloodstains covered the ground around them.

Jerash is home to one of the world’s best-preserved Roman cities and is a major attraction for tourists who are a lifeline for the Jordanian economy.

Tourism contributes about 10% of Jordan’s GDP. Visitors significantly declined after the outbreak of the civil war in neighbouring Syria and with the resumption of conflict in Iraq, but has recovered in the past three years.

The kingdom is politically stable and has a low crime rate but contributed one of the highest shares per capita of fighters to Isis, with a surge in terrorist incidents recorded since 2015.

Among the most deadliest was a shooting spree by Isis militants in the town of Karak in December 2016 that killed a dozen people including a Canadian tourist. The attack ended with a siege inside a Crusader castle in the area.

Sam Jones in Madrid contributed to this report