August 4, 2002	Sunday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 24,1423

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ISLAMABAD, Aug 3: More than 600 Kuwaiti prisoners of war (PoWs) have been languishing in Iraqi jails for 11 years, while some of them may have either been tortured to death or have died themselves.

This has been stated in a report, “A humanitarian tragedy”, released by the Pak-Kuwait Friendship Society at a press conference here on Friday.

According to the report, the Kuwait authorities have sought from Iraq immediate information about those, who are still alive, and have asked Iraq to allow humanitarian organizations, such as ICRC, to visit the prisoners in the jails and to see production of evidence relevant to death of others. The authorities have demanded that the issue should be brought to the notice of the United Nations Security Council.

The report says: “During the seven months of Iraqi occupation, unarmed civilians were arrested by Iraqi security forces from their homes, from the streets and other public places and detained in a variety of locations before transferring them forcibly to Iraq.”

In February 1991, the ICRC and other humanitarian agencies were allowed into Kuwait, who constituted a special committee to coordinate swift repatriation of the PoWs in both directions. The committee, which was known as Riayadh Committee, was later referred to the Tripartite Commission.

Some 6,000 Kuwaiti POWs found their way home in the process. However, a plan of action was adopted for the repatriation of mortal remains along with the tracing of the PoWs and civilian detainees unaccounted for on April 12, 1991. The Kuwaiti authorities concentrated their efforts on drawing up reliable and documented individual files, while Iraq hampered the work of the Tripartite Commission by boycotting its meetings for more than two years till 1994.

When Iraq resumed participation in the meetings of the commission in July 1994, more than 600 files of missing PoWs were submitted. However, all those efforts failed to produce any results and, to date, 605 Kuwaiti and third country nationals are still in detention or unaccounted for by the Iraqi regime.