Manama Kuwait’s foreign ministry has launched a series of moves to verify reports that Kuwaiti Prisoners of War (POWs) were alive and that they have been transferred to neighbouring Iran.
A spokesman for the ministry said that officials held a meeting with Mohammad Bahar Al Oloum, Iraq’s ambassador to Kuwait, to request him to check with the Iraqi authorities the accuracy of the reports on the potential existence of the Kuwaiti POWs.
The ministry also asked the Kuwaiti ambassador to Iraq Ali Al Moumen to take up the issue with Iraqi authorities and contacted the regional mission of the International Committee , Kuwait News Agency (Kuna) reported.
Local Arabic daily Al Seyassah on Thursday reported that more than 350 of the 600 Kuwait POWs were alive after the collapse of the regime of Saddam Hussain in March 2003.
The daily said that it gathered the information from Iraqi official and tribal sources who reportedly said that they believed the prisoners were “transferred to Iran as part of political calculations by some parties who took advantage of the collapse of the Iraqi state to smuggle them out of the country and use them later as bargaining cards.”
According to the report, well-informed sources in the Iraqi government revealed that Wadhban Al Tikriti, the former interior minister and half-brother of Saddam Hussain, told the current Iraqi government that most of the Kuwaiti PoWs were alive until the fall of the regime in 2003.
Tribal leaders corroborated the information and said that more than 350 prisoners were held in the prisons of Babel and Samawa in southern Iraq until March 9, 2003 when the Saddam regime fell, the daily reported.
The tribal leaders said that they believed that the prisoners were likely taken to a neighbouring country when Iraq slid into chaos.
