March 8, 2003	Saturday	Muharram 4, 1424

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KUWAIT CITY, March 7: UN observers saw people they suspect were US soldiers in civilian clothes in areas of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) on the Kuwait-Iraq border where seven gaps were later found in the electric fence, a UN official said on Friday.

“We have seen (people believed to be) US soldiers in plainclothes coming into the DMZ in the last few days,” according to Daljeet Bagga, spokesman for the UN Iraq-Kuwait Observer Mission (UNIKOM) in Kuwait.

They were wearing civilian clothes, had short haircuts and were travelling in civilian vehicles, most of them with Kuwaiti license plates, and at times accompanied by Kuwaiti border guards, he added.

The people visited the same areas where UN observers later discovered gaps in the fence.

UN officials have reported the unannounced visits to UN headquarters in New York, he said. US troops are explicitly banned from entering the DMZ, set up after the 1991 Gulf War which ended a seven-month Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.

Security sources who asked not to be named said it appeared the visitors were surveying the area to determine where the fence should be cut and allow a path for military vehicles to travel through.

Bagga told AFP earlier that the fence had been cut in up to seven places. “We’re trying to ascertain why it was done.”—AFP