The explosive that killed a Jordanian security official who confiscated it from a Mainichi photographer at an international airport in Amman could have been one of the small bombs contained in a cluster bomb, eyewitnesses said.

Harumi Yamashita, Cairo Bureau chief for Tokyo Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS), was traveling to Baghdad last month with several other Japanese reporters, including the Mainichi photographer, Hiroki Gomi.

The TBS reporter said Gomi showed him "bell-shaped objects" while the Japanese media corps were alighting at a U.S. checkpoint in the Iraqi capital on April 11.

At the time, the two were talking about an incident in which a windscreen of a TBS vehicle suddenly shattered without warning.

"Maybe something like this struck your vehicle," Gomi said as he showed the objects, one of which is believed to be the explosive that subsequently went off in Queen Alia International Airport on May 1, killing a security official and injuring three more people.

Yamashita said they were two small metal objects attached together with a string. Each of them was about 5 centimeters long and had a dent in the bottom.

Kensuke Ebata, a Jane's Defense Weekly correspondent in Tokyo, believes that the objects were M77 fragmentation bomblets. "I think they were highly likely to be M77 bomblets. They have a diameter of just 3.8 centimeters and are only 8.1 centimeter long. They can be fired from land-based MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System)," the military expert said. "Each bomblet has a piece of cloth attached to the top (to help them spread around the target better). It is reasonable to believe that two of them got tangled together."

Ebata added that the U.S. developed system was first used during the 1991 Gulf War and has been in common use ever since. However, only military officers specializing in rocket systems would recognize bomblets.

"It is not surprising that the airport official (the Jordanian security official killed in the blast) did not know what it was," Ebata said.

A total of 644 M77 bomblets are contained inside a M26 rocket that can be fired from MLRS. Up to five percent of these bomblets could remain unexploded on the ground.

U.S. and British forces used thousands of these "cluster bombs" during the recent Iraq war.

Gomi has told Jordanian investigators that he found the objects scattered around an abandoned car in Iraq on April 11 and kept them in his bag.

He gave one of them to his Jordanian assistant as a "souvenir" and kept one for himself.

The one in Gomi's possession exploded as the security official at the airport was examining it. (Mainichi Shimbun, May 4, 2003)