KUWAIT CITY, 27 January 2003 — A car backfiring seems to have been enough to send a US troop convoy scurrying to report another shooting in Kuwait, betraying jitters among the thousands of soldiers massed on Iraq’s doorstep.
Kuwait flatly denied any shots had been fired Saturday near the convoy traveling west of the capital.
A highway ambush last Tuesday, which killed a US civilian contractor and seriously wounded another, shook up an already nervous American Army that since last October has been increasingly threatened by the civilians it liberated from Iraqi occupation in 1991. A US Army spokesman said Saturday that “a convoy reported shots fired from a car on the 6th ring road at the 605 overpass,” but was unable to specify if the shots were aimed at the troops.
The emirate’s Interior Ministry released a statement saying that reports of a shooting at a US Army convoy were “baseless and incorrect”. The statement urged citizens to ignore rumors and verify information through official channels.
A senior Kuwaiti security official said that a license plate number registered during Saturday’s incident was traced to an Iranian man, who during investigation said his car had simply backfired close to the convoy.
“The man had nothing on him, he was innocent,” the official said. “Nothing happened today, there was no such shooting.”
But US troops are taking no chances. There have been six shooting incidents — three of them serious — involving Americans here since last October, when two Kuwaiti gunmen killed a US marine and wounded another during war games on a Kuwaiti island.
In Washington, the State Department is considering scaling down the US presence in Kuwait due to heightened security concerns.
Kuwait’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sheikh Mohammad Sabah Al-Sabah, however told A-Rai Al-Aam newspaper Saturday that Washington would only reduce the numbers of diplomats’ families, due more to regional instability than the local security situation. (AFP)
