ABU DHABI, 15 April 2003 — Eighteen Kuwaitis held since the 1991 Gulf War were among prisoners kept in an underground shelter in Baghdad, Abu Dhabi satellite television reported yesterday, quoting a former Iraqi colonel. The men “are alive ... and in an underground shelter near the military tribunal in the Al-Khadra district,” the channel said without naming its source.

The colonel, now running the civilian administration in the central city of Najaf, was quoted as saying he knew the soldiers in charge of guarding the prisoners “and told American and British forces about them yesterday”.

“The prisoners were held by the Republican Guard and moved from one governorate to another. Before the ground war began they were put in the underground shelter in Baghdad” and remained there.

Kuwait says 605 people disappeared during Baghdad’s occupation of the emirate in 1990-1991 and believes many were kept in Iraqi jails. The emirate on Saturday offered a reward to anyone who helps determine the fate of the missing people.

“We have no information on the whereabouts of the POWs (prisoners of war) after the fall of the Iraqi regime, but we hope for a speedy solution to end the suffering of the POWs and their families which has lasted for more than 12 years,” said First Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah.

Apart from Kuwaiti nationals, the 605 people missing or taken prisoner include 14 Saudis, five Egyptians, five Iranians, four Syrians, three Lebanese, one Bahraini, one Omani and one Indian, according to Kuwaiti authorities.

Saddam’s regime said there had been prisoners, but that it lost track of them during an uprising by Shiites in southern Iraq following the rout in Kuwait.

The ousted Baghdad regime had also claimed 1,142 Iraqis had been missing since the Gulf War.

Meanwhile, the seven newly freed US prisoners of war were increasingly certain they faced death at the hands of their Iraqi captors. Instead, US Marines stormed the place they were being held, according to a Knight Ridder reporter who talked to the seven aboard the C-130 transport aircraft that ferried them from Iraq to Kuwait Sunday.

The group had been moved six times in as many days, Shoshana Johnson said. “It was getting to the point where I believed they were going to kill us,” said Johnson, 30, a cook with the 507th Maintenance Company, which was ambushed March 23 after taking a wrong turn near Nassiriyah in southern Iraq. She was shot in both ankles during the attack.

Pfc. Patrick Miller, 23, kept asking his guards if they were going to kill him. They said they were not. “I still didn’t believe them, so I kept asking,” Miller said. Sgt. James Riley, 31, described the ambush. “It wasn’t a little ambush, it was the whole city and we were shot from front, rear, left,” along a one-to-two-kilometer stretch of highway. All had their weapons jam due to sand kicked up as they traveled from Kuwait.

Riley tried manually loading his M-16 automatic rifle but “realized there were too many of them.” “We couldn’t even make a bayonet charge,” he said.

“We were like Custer.” Initially focused on looting captured trucks, Nassiriyah residents soon turned their attention to the prisoners. Miller said: “A couple of people punched me, a couple of people hit me in the back with sticks.”

But when they discovered, after opening her suit, that Johnson was a woman, Iraqis treated her “very well,” Johnson said. “I don’t know why.” The Texan said she hoped to be back home by May 20 for her daughter’s third birthday.

Chief Warrant Officer David Williams, 30, of Orlando, Florida, was one of two pilots aboard an Apache helicopter that had to make a forced-landing.

The two swam in a canal as slowly as possible with just their heads visible, but when armed villagers spotted them, they decided to surrender.

The villagers “beat us a little, one of them with a stick,” then the two were thrown in the back of a truck. Their captors stopped occasionally “to show all the other people that they had captured Americans.”

The two groups were brought together by their captors two days after being caught. Overjoyed relatives of the rescued soldiers told US television Sunday that the Pentagon has confirmed the rescue of their loved ones.