June 3, 2003	Tuesday	Rabi-us-Sani 2, 1424

LONDON, June 2: The US navy said on Monday two small boats carrying four US soldiers and at least three civilians had disappeared in northern Gulf waters.

The Fifth Fleet said the two boats were heading towards the Shatt al-Arab waterway from Iraq’s Mina al-Bakr oil terminal when they vanished on Sunday.

The navy’s Bahrain-based maritime liaison office said in a statement to merchant shipping that the vessels had been on their way to the Iraqi port of Faw to pick up Iraqi oil workers.

The liaison office said the boats were transporting “one US civilian engineer, four US army soldiers, two Kuwaiti civilian operators, and possibly one other unidentified person”.

The vessels were last seen 1.5kms north of the Mina al Baker oil terminal.

One of the boats, the Green Star 1, is described as nine metres long, with a white hull with two outboard engines.—Reuters