BAGHDAD, 18 May 2003 — A member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle yesterday surrendered to coalition forces in Iraq, where a mass grave thought to hold hundreds of Kuwaiti prisoners of war was uncovered outside Baghdad.
Gen. Kamal Mustafa Abdallah Sultan Al-Tikriti, former secretary general of Iraq’s Republican Guard, surrendered to coalition forces early in the morning in Baghdad, said a US Central Command statement in Dubai.
He was listed as number eight in the list of 55 most-wanted leaders of the deposed regime that the US military published last month.
Officials from the Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress said that a mass grave thought to contain up to 600 Kuwaiti prisoners of war executed in 1991 after the first Gulf War has been uncovered west of Baghdad. Accompanying reporters on a tour of the site, INC officials said they had so far dug up close to 40 sets of human remains following a tip-off from an Iraqi involved in the burial here.
“A witness approached us and told us that 600 Kuwaiti prisoners had been executed and buried here in August 1991. He gave us detailed maps and an account of what happened, and when we came here and dug a little we found human remains,” INC official Abdul Aziz Al-Qubaysi told reporters.
A team from Kuwait was due to leave within the next few days to investigate the site, an official from the POWs committee in Kuwait told AFP.
“According to the witness, the prisoners were tied up, blindfolded and executed and then put in six trucks, driven here and buried. The witness knows this because he was driving one of the trucks,” Al-Qubaysi added. At the site, on the banks of a lake near Habbaniyah around 80 km (50 miles) west of Baghdad, several sets of human remains and shards of clothing were laid out on piles of earth scooped from the ground.
