KUWAIT CITY, 13 April 2004 — A Kuwaiti team yesterday buried the remains of eight nationals and one stateless Arab captured during the 1990-91 Iraqi occupation of the emirate.
The team was tasked to search mass graves in Iraq for the remains of several hundred missing persons from the 1990-91 occupation that led to the first Gulf War.
On Sunday it had identified through DNA testing the remains of the nine men. The team has been searching for the remains of the POWs in Iraq since the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s regime a year ago.
The latest identifications brought the number whose remains have been identified by the team to 101.
More than 500 others, mostly Kuwaitis, are still unaccounted for. Some third country nationals among them had been working in Kuwait when they were captured as prisoners by the occupying Iraqi Army.
Senior Kuwaiti officials attended the burial including Interior Minister Sheikh Nawaf Al-Sabah who said that Kuwait “was proudly mourning the martyrs who defended their country”.
Meanwhile, a group of Kuwaiti lawmakers and political activists are forming a “parliamentary-popular” committee to support the Iraqi people against the US-led occupation, an activist said yesterday.
“A meeting will be held today in Parliament to make the official announcement,” Osama Al-Munawer, a member of an ad hoc panel setting up the committee, told AFP.
Representatives of most political groups and a “large” number of MPs are expected to attend the meeting, which comes on the heels of a US offensive on the Iraqi town of Fallujah in which some 600 people are reported to have been killed.
“The committee’s purpose is to support the Iraqi people against the American occupation ... We plan to send humanitarian supplies to Iraq and particularly to Fallujah,” said Munawer.
“The Americans are committing a massacre in Fallujah ... No one can accept this ... It looks as if they have used nonconventional weapons in the attack,” claimed Munawer, an advocate and a lawyer.
A Kuwaiti group on Sunday condemned as “brutal and savage” the US assault on Fallujah and other Iraqi towns, and outlawed any dealings with the US military and companies operating in Iraq.
The Salafi Movement, known for its anti-American stance, urged the Kuwaiti government to “stand with the Iraqi people”, in line with the principles of “Arab nationalism and Shariah law.”
