Kuwaiti Doctors, Nurses Recount Litany of Horror : Atrocities: They remain stunned by savagery of Iraqi troops. Torture and executions were common, they say.

Saddam Hussein’s secret police came for Dr. Hisham Abedan at night. His crime: He had treated a wounded Kuwaiti man in his home.

For 12 days last September they tortured the devout Muslim gynecologist from Kuwait Maternity Hospital, plucking his fingernails out and burning him with cigarettes, his colleagues said Thursday. Then they took him home at midnight and called his family outside.

“They shoot him in the head in front of his brothers and parents, and they throw his body in the rubbish,” said a colleague, Dr. Mohammed Mahfouz. “And they order his family not to move the body until morning.”

Similar tales of horror were common in this battered capital a day after allied forces liberated the city. Doctors say they still are stunned by the savagery of the seven-month reign of terror by Iraqi troops.

Dr. Khalid Shalawi, head physician at Mubarak Hospital, said Thursday that he has often wept “over what has happened in Kuwait--it was worse than people thought.”

Basma Yusef, head nurse for casualties at Mubarak, Kuwait’s largest hospital, said that the worst cases of torture she had to treat seemed to be victims accused of taking part in the Kuwaiti resistance.

One man’s ears were cut off, she said. Another was burned so badly “he had no skin,” she said. “We think they used acid.”

And three weeks ago, she said, the bodies of nine Kuwaitis were found, killed by ax blows to the head.

“The head is open and the brains are out,” Yusef said. “Some, their eyes have been taken out.”

Most perplexing to the doctors was the fate of Rasha Kabundi, a young mother of three. She was shot four times in the chest and face. Then the top of her skull was cut off with an electric saw. Her body, too, was dumped in a rubbish heap.

“It’s awful,” said Dr. Shalawi. “It’s a nightmare. We’re still in a state of shock.”

He estimated that 250 to 300 Kuwaitis were tortured and killed in the city. The grim total may never be known, however, since ambulances were forbidden to pick up the bodies, and many families buried their victims alone.

Among Kuwaiti officials in the United States, accounts continued to vary widely about how many Kuwaiti civilians had been killed or kidnaped by Iraqi occupiers.

In Washington, Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, Sheik Saud al Nasir al Sabah, told reporters after a White House meeting with President Bush that the Iraqis are believed to have killed about 2,000 Kuwaiti civilians. He said they had seized “between 4,000 to 5,000, perhaps more than that” as apparent hostages.

In New York, however, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United Nations put the number considerably higher: 22,000 abducted Kuwaiti civilians and 8,632 Kuwaiti prisoners of war. He made no mention of slain civilians.

In Kuwait city, the torture was carried out in police stations, a sports club, and even in Dasman Palace, the now gutted residence of Kuwait’s ruler, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah. The executions were carried out everywhere, witnesses said.

“The last group was 10 days ago,” Dr. Shalawi said. “They took four young boys, 15, 16, 17. They all work in restaurants. They accused them of being resistance. They killed them all--shot in the head.”

Another 17 victims, also killed by shots in the head, were brought to the Al Amiri Hospital in February. All told, 38 bodies, including that of a woman who had been hanged, were received by the hospital after Iraq invaded Kuwait last Aug. 2, said Dr. Ammar Baroon, a surgeon.

The “crimes” for which Kuwaitis could be tortured and killed included such things as using Kuwaiti money, which features a likeness of the emir.

“They catch many people because they found Kuwaiti flags, or a picture of the emir, anything from Kuwait,” said Dr. Jassim Sailakawi, assistant registrar at Kuwait Maternity Hospital.

Sailakawi said an Iraqi officer ordered nurses to remove ubiquitous stickers that say “My Country, Kuwait” from walls and pictures.

“He said take all the stickers off or we destroy the hospital,” the doctor said.

A four-barreled Iraqi antiaircraft battery and concrete blockhouses were placed in the parking lot in front of the Al Amiri Hospital in apparent violation of Geneva Conventions that bar military positions outside hospitals.

The gun stood fully loaded with belts of ammunition Thursday, and the ground was littered with empty brass casings. Iraqi helmets, caps and uniforms were scattered in the bunkers.

“They shoot all the time,” said Dr. Baroon. “They just hear the voice of the plane and start shooting. But they have no target.”

Other antiaircraft guns and bunkers were placed at the Adan Hospital and around the sprawling Sabah Hospital complex, renamed Saddam General Hospital by the Iraqis. Now abandoned, the guns all were aimed toward the Persian Gulf in anticipation of an amphibious landing by U.S. Marines that never came.

Not all the stories are awful. One Kuwaiti resistance fighter, shot in the stomach, was dying of his wound until friends risked taking him to the Mubarak Hospital by dressing him in a long black abaya worn by women here, putting a shawl on his head, and telling guards he was a pregnant woman. He was treated and survived, his friends said.

But Mubarak’s chief administrator, Dr. Jusef Nasf, and deputy administrator, Dr. Ahmad Magad, remain missing after they and an unknown number of other Kuwaitis were arrested while praying at mosques last Friday and taken away on buses by armed Iraqi soldiers, Dr. Shalawi said.

“No one knows where they are,” he added.

After the invasion, Iraqi troops carted off critically needed medical equipment, including electron microscopes and dialysis machines, and they took most of the drugs stored in the city’s main medical warehouse, doctors said.

At the Kuwait Institute of Scientific Studies, they carried off computers, laboratory equipment, even the kitchen sinks. They drove away with all of the city’s ambulances, eventually bringing in poorly equipped, aging Iraqi vans to replace them.

“If you go on foot, you reach the hospital faster than in an Iraqi ambulance,” Sailakawi complained.

Dr. Mohammed Jassem, an anesthesiologist at Al Amiri, said his cousin, 26-year-old Iman Hamed, had just given birth to twin girls when the Iraqis invaded.

“One (baby) was in the incubator,” he said. “Then they rang her and said come take your baby. The Iraqis are taking the incubator.” The infant survived. But reports that other babies were removed from incubators and left to die so outraged world public opinion that Hussein arranged for a CNN television crew, then in Baghdad, to visit the Kuwait Maternity Hospital last fall.

The CNN footage, censored by the Iraqis, showed gleaming hospital equipment and interviews with doctors saying that conditions were normal.

“It’s all fake, but we were afraid to speak the truth,” said Dr. Sami I. Taher, the maternity hospital’s director. He said an Iraqi administrator called in the staff the night before to warn that CNN was coming. “He brought all the instruments into one room,” he said. “All the others were empty. He threatened the doctors and said you must say everything is fine.”

Taher said the doctors feared for their lives if they disobeyed.

“CNN, they go,” he said. “But we must stay here. These people, if we do not tell what they want, they will kill you.”

The city’s five major hospitals face serious problems now. Water and power is cut off in the city, and most doctors and nurses--particularly those from abroad--have fled.

At the nine-story Al Amiri, only eight doctors remain of the 65 before the invasion. The 560-bed Kuwait Maternity Hospital, largest in the Mideast, had 120 doctors and 600 nurses. Today, it has eight doctors and a dozen nurses.

Two huge maternity wards, usually staffed by 30 nurses, now have only one; she had not left the building since Jan. 15. A generator powers a string of lights, like Christmas bulbs, overhead.

For some patients the shortages have meant death, doctors said. Half of the 60 dialysis patients at Mubarak Hospital have died in recent weeks because there is not enough water to run the machines properly, according to the staff. Three others died of heart attacks because coronary equipment was unavailable.

“For some people, we play the role of God,” said Dr. Shalawi. “Older people, we treat them conservatively, and concentrate on saving the young people.”

As an afternoon thunderstorm rumbled outside, Shalawi said that he has not left the hospital in weeks. He has no desire to see the wanton destruction that retreating Iraqi soldiers left behind in this once-elegant seaside city: the burned-out luxury hotels, gutted government buildings, hulks of hundreds of cars, trucks and military vehicles.

The emir’s beachfront palace is mostly a burned shell; all the books in the wood-paneled library lie torn or tossed on the floor. The National Museum is gutted by fire; antitank grenades were fired through the planetarium dome. Boats were sunk in the harbor, downtown shops are riddled with bullet holes.

“I do not want to see,” Shalawi said quietly. “I want to forget.”

Times staff writer David Lauter in Washington contributed to this report.