KUWAIT CITY, 22 April 2003 — A Kuwaiti mother claims to have seen her son, missing since Iraq’s 1990-91 occupation of the emirate, in a picture from a Baghdad hospital that was published in a newspaper here, the daily Al-Watan said yesterday.

“Did Kuwait coincidentally find the first Kuwaiti POW at the psychiatric hospital through a picture in Al-Watan?” the daily said in its front-page headline, under which the mother was quoted as saying: “This is my son Jamal.”

The mother of the missing Kuwaiti, identified as Jamal Ahmad Abdullah Al-Mathkur, claims that the man in a picture of a patient in Baghdad’s Al-Rashad psychiatric hospital is her son, Al-Watan reported.

“A mother cannot mistake her son. A mother cannot forget what her son looks like, even if many years have passed. This is my son, I know him, maybe a bit thinner, but these are his features,” the mother said.

She noted that in the picture, there appeared to be a scar on the man’s eyebrow, identical to that of her son who was injured in a car accident in 1980.

Al-Mathkur was born in 1958 and worked in the Kuwaiti Defense Ministry, the newspaper said. He went missing during the occupation on his return to Kuwait from Saudi Arabia to deliver weapons to the Kuwaiti resistance, and has not been seen since the 1991 uprising in southern Iraq.

Other members of Al-Mathkur’s family also said the person in the published picture resembles him. His brother, Fahd, called on the Kuwaiti authorities to help him go to Baghdad to track down the man in the picture and confirm if it was indeed his brother.

Kuwait has offered a $1 million reward to anyone who provides the emirate with “authentic” information on the fate of more than 600 people missing since the seven-month occupation.

A team of Kuwaiti volunteers is already in Iraq seeking news of the prisoners, an issue that has cast a shadow over Kuwait for more than 12 years. Apart from Kuwaiti nationals, the 605 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 Hussein’s regime said there had been prisoners, but that it had lost track of them during an uprising 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.