Egan had been blunt. If this case was going to be resolved anytime soon, he told Dokur and her entourage, it was going to have to be done through administrative means. The courts were too risky. Appeals, delays and complex legal motions citing arcane passages in Islamic law books could easily turn the whole matter into a decade-long waiting game.

No, if this was going to be done, it had to be done politically. And it had to be done carefully. The King of Jordan may have been powerful, as leaders go, but he still had to deal with deep fissures in his government, and it would have at the very least been reckless for him to confront Gen. Abequa head on.

Egan advised Dokur to be patient. Wheels had to be set in motion. And in the Middle East, wheels turn slowly.

But patience was a virtue that Dokur was finding hard to master. Along with her slain sister’s strength, Dokur had also apparently been infused with her fierce devotion to the children. It galled Dokur to think of the children, “Sesame Street Kids,” her daughter had called them, living like prisoners in a run-down apartment on a desolate dirt road in Sweileh.

American officials -- Clora the consul among them --  had visited the children there. They found that, despite Gen. Abequa’s lofty status,  the children were living under “virtual house arrest in an almost intolerable … flat,” Sen. Lautenberg would later say. The apartment lacked air conditioning, despite temperatures up to 110 degrees. It was infested with bugs and rats. The children spoke little, an indication, Dokur would later say, that “maybe everything’s not perfect there.”

But there was little that Dokur could do. The next move belonged to the Jordanian government.

It was to be a dramatic move.

Mohammed Ishamil Abequa had been held without bail in a Jordanian jail almost since his return to his native country. He had confessed to the slaying, but he had not formally been charged with murder or kidnapping.

Prosecutors in Amman told reporters that they intended to proceed cautiously with the case. But on Aug. 4, 1994, the government announced that it had secretly indicted Abequa several days earlier, charging him with murdering his wife and kidnapping his children. There were three counts in all and each count carried a maximum three-year penalty. News of the indictment was splashed across the front page of Amman’s daily newspapers.  Privately, prosecutors in Amman acknowledged that the indictment was a calculated move designed to help the dead woman's sister win custody of her niece and nephew.

For days Dokur and Feinberg and the other members of their team had been sitting in their Amman hotel room trying to read political tea leaves to see what their next move should be. The indictment hit both families like a lightening bolt, and Feinberg and Dokur huddled together to interpret it. "The fact that he has been charged with kidnapping is very significant," Feinberg told Dokur. "It sends the message that this is a special case, and it also puts his family in a difficult light because they are then holding kidnapped children." It also provided Dokur with an extra measure of security in case the political efforts to free the children failed and the case wound up before a religious court.

"I think it will have an impact on the court, depending on how involved the hearing gets," Feinberg  mused  "If it rises to a level of  questions of the welfare of the Abequa children, I think the fact that their father is charged with murder and bringing them here illegally will have an obvious impact."

Feinberg and Dokur were not alone in interpreting the charges as a  signal that the government was quietly trying to expedite Dokur’s quest to be reunited with the children. Abequa’s family said they saw it as a direct challenge from the Jordanian government to their claim. The charges, the family said, were only the latest example of the government’s efforts to discredit them.

Ahmed Abequa, the accused killer's brother, complained in an  interview on the day the charges were announced, that the government had been using the Jordanian press to discredit Mohammed Abequa and boost Dokur's case.

"Nobody puts anybody's name in the newspaper who is accused of a capital crime in Jordan," Ahmed Abequa said.  "But in this case, the name is constantly printed in big black letters in the newspapers." He said coverage in the local press depicted Dokur sympathetically. "This is a tragedy for two families," he said.  "And it has become an international tragedy."

The charges against his brother and the claimed manipulation of the press was all part of a government conspiracy, he said. The government was about to cave in to American pressure and remove the two children from the Abequa home, he fumed.  "We have many friends in the capital.  But we have friends as well who are also our enemies," Ahmed Abequa said.