Amman: A Jordanian was charged Thursday with stabbing to death his wife and two young daughters and seriously wounding a third in apparent ‘honour’ killings, judicial and security sources said.

The killings took place on Wednesday in the northern town of Ramtha and the prosecutor charged the 28-year-old with premeditated murder, a judicial source said.

A security source said the man turned himself in to the authorities after the crime, claiming to have killed them to defend the family’s ‘honour’ because he ‘suspected that his wife was cheating on him’.

According to the security source, the couple had a row during which the wife told her husband that their three daughters — aged three, two and one — were not his but fathered by another man.

‘He went crazy and grabbed a kitchen knife with which he stabbed his wife and three daughters,’ said the source.

The wife and two of the girls — the three-year-old and the two-year-old — were killed on the spot while the one-year-old was admitted to hospital in a serious condition, the security source added.

Murder is punishable by death by hanging in Jordan, but courts usually commute or reduce sentences in cases of so-called ‘honour killings,’ particularly if the extended family urges leniency.

The conservative Muslim majority country sees around 15 to 20 such cases a year.