KUWAIT CITY, 6 August 2003 — A Kuwaiti team searching for the whereabouts of prisoners captured by Iraq said yesterday it will soon start digging up graves in the emirate believed to contain remains of some POWs.
“We have obtained all the necessary authorizations. We have got a fatwa, or religious edict, to dig the graves. We will search sites in Rigga and Sulaibkhat,” the emirate’s two main cemeteries, team head Fayez Al-Enezi said.
“Digging will begin in the next few days. We strongly believe the sites contain remains of a number of POWs ... executed by Saddam Hussein’s troops,” during Baghdad’s 1990-91 occupation of Kuwait, Enezi said, not ruling out further digs. Kuwait says thousands of its citizens and other nationals were taken prisoner by Iraq after Saddam’s forces invaded the emirate in August 1990 and occupied it for seven months, but 605 of them remained unaccounted for.
Apart from Kuwaiti nationals, those missing include 14 Saudis, five Egyptians, five Iranians, four Syrians, three Lebanese, one Bahraini, an Omani and an Indian, according to Kuwaiti authorities.
Through DNA testing, Kuwait has already identified the remains of 12 Kuwaiti men and a Lebanese woman whose remains were uncovered in a mass grave in Samawa, 200 kilometers (120 miles) south of Baghdad, declared them “martyrs” and buried them in official funerals attended by ministers.
The team is now testing 137 more remains from the Samawa mass grave, as well as 13 others from the Iraqi towns of Habaniya and Ramadi. “We believe that most of the remains are those of Kuwaiti prisoners,” Enezi said. The UN official in charge of overseeing the return of Kuwaiti prisoners and property seized by Iraq said Saturday there were no signs that any of the missing Kuwaitis were still alive. The International Committee of the Red Cross has “officially notified” the national committee for Kuwaiti prisoners of the presence of remains of 120 more Kuwaitis in a mass grave in Iraq.
