The riot broke out late on Tuesday prompting prison officials to send a team of negotiators to meet with the inmates at Juweideh prison, south of Amman, where top security threats are held, officials said.
A police colonel negotiator was among those seized, said deputy police chief Major General Abdel Salam Al Jaafreh. A total of eight police guards and officers were held on Wednesday while several others were freed overnight.
By mid-afternoon the last hostages were set free, interior minister Eid Al Fayez said.
"There are no hostages. The situation was resolved through negotiations and everything is back to normal," Major General Ali Al Khalidi, an assistant to Jordan's police chief, told state television from the prison.
"The situation is under our control," he added, without clarifying exactly how the crisis was resolved.
Fayez said earlier that the prisoners were demanding that detainees on death row and those on trial at the state security court, a military tribunal, be held in the same jail.
Detainees locked the negotiators in prison cells after they had entered the jail to discuss their demands, police spokesman Major Bashir Al Daajeh told a news conference.
Rebutting some media reports of casualties, officials claimed that no force was used and that the negotiators were unarmed when they entered inmates' cell at Juweideh.
However, Fayez acknowledged that "minor disturbances" broke out in two other prisons, Swaiqah and Qafqafa, which were quickly brought under control.
According to police spokesman Daajeh, one of the death row inmates with whom the prisoners want to be united is Azmi Jayussi, an associate of Jordanian-born fugitive Zarqawi.
Jayussi was sentenced to death in February for plotting a chemical attack on Jordan's intelligence headquarters and is being held at another top security jail, Swaiqah, also south of Amman.
Several cases involving conspiracy plots and terrorist-linked attacks are being heard by the state security court.
They include cases involving Zarqawi, who has been sentenced to death in absentia in three cases including the chemical plot and the murder of a US diplomat in 2002.
Daajeh stressed that convicts implicated in the US diplomat's death, including Libyan national Salem Bin Suweid, were also held in Swaiqah prison, contradicting media reports that he could have been behind the Juweideh riot.
He also dismissed reports that the riot broke out when police tried to transfer Islamists on death row out of Juweideh to implement the verdict. "We did not receive any instructions to carry out a death sentence," he said.
According to Daajeh 79 Islamists are being detained in Juweideh, out of 180 held behind bars across Jordan.
Jordan's prisons have come under harsh criticism from human rights groups in Amman and abroad, amid charges that the centers are over-crowded and that torture widespread.
In December the independent National Center for Human Rights urged the authorities to shut down the isolated Jafer desert prison saying that it violated prisoners' rights to be held close to family and their lawyers.
© 2006 Agence France-Presse
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