It’s only about three miles from the broad avenues and gleaming sophistication of Amman, with its modern hotels and upscale restaurants catering to globe-trotting businessmen and tourists, with its elaborate mansions and sturdy government buildings, to the squalid narrow streets of Sweilah. Three miles and a thousand years.

In Sweileh, women still huddle in the shadowy back rooms of their houses, their heads and faces covered in the traditional burqua.  Men, dressed in traditional garb, still gather in groups around open fires, sipping strong coffee laced with cardamom, and puffing on hookahs, filling the air around them with the sweet scent of cherry tobacco.

Donkeys still ply the streets of Sweilah, and the only law that matters was given directly by God to Mohammad and the prophets and is enshrined forever in the Q’aran.

It was here that Mohammed Ishmail Abequa grew up and it was here that he sought sanctuary after murdering his wife.

Perhaps he believed that the rigid fundamentalism and unchanging tradition of the place would shield him from the consequences of his actions, that somehow, on these ancient streets, no one would find him.

Or perhaps, Nesime Dokur would later say, Abequa believed that in Sweilah he would find sanctuary among people who, like him, felt that any means were justified if the goal was to punish his wife for failing to abide by his strict interpretation of Islamic law, and to protect his children from being forever tainted by American culture.

Nesime Dokur always believed that her former brother-in-law miscalculated -- gravely.

“I was talking to an Imam, a holy man,” Dokur said not long after her former brother-in-law fled to Jordan. “He said that Islam does not reward people for their crimes. I believe that’s true.”

Within a few days of his arrival in Jordan, Abequa was detained on suspicion of kidnapping. To Abequa and his family, the arrest seemed at first almost a formality, and it provided what they believed was a forum through which the killer could persuade his countrymen that he did what needed to be done, and nothing more.

In a country of 3.9 million that reported 150 homicides the year before -- many of them so-called “honor crimes” like his -- Abequa believed that the Sha’aria or the Islamic religious courts, would treat him with leniency. In an interview with an American television crew not long after he was detained, Abequa cast the slaying as an honorable one. Nina "wanted to raise the kids the way she liked," Abequa  told the interviewer.  "She didn't allow me to live with my kids. Therefore, I killed her."

But there were forces at work far beyond the rock-strewn streets of Sweileh that Abequa could not begin to fathom. Even his brother, the general, for all his political savvy, could not have fully comprehended the forces that were massing against them.

In meetings with top Jordanian officials in Washington, U.S. officials warned that Jordan’s prestige and a substantial amount of foreign aid depended on how the nation handled Abequa and the children.  Torricelli, then a young congressman, warned that Jordan, which had been wracked by economic problems and was still recovering the international influence it lost when it backed Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the Gulf war, could ill-afford to anger the United States over the case. He pledged to fight to withhold U.S. foreign aid to Jordan to force Hussein to return the children.

The king, Torricelli said at the time, saw the wisdom in supporting the American quest. “The king assured me that their return is the right thing and gave me every assurance that the children would be returned soon," Torricelli  said after a 45-minute meeting between Hussein and members of the New Jersey’s congressional delegation a few weeks after the slaying.

Lautenberg, then the state’s junior senator, put it this way: "I'm now confident that this situation is being discussed at the highest levels of the Jordanian government. These children are American citizens, and I've let the Jordanians know…that until the kids are brought home to New Jersey, our efforts will not stop."

Within a few days of that meeting, Hussein met with Nesime Dokur. He invited her to come to Jordan to press her case herself.

Dokur, along with Nancy and Paul Feinberg, partners in their law practice as well as husband and wife, wasted no time accepting the king’s invitation. They were on their way to Sweilah.

But despite the king’s implied support, their success was hardly guaranteed.