1,181 Kuwaiti Hostages Are Returned Home

Waving and cheering, and bedraggled but safe, 1,181 Kuwaitis who had been abducted as hostages by Iraqi troops were bused on Friday from Iraq’s border to their homes in Kuwait city.

About 80 of the newly freed Kuwaitis started walking back from this heavily bombed border town as a protest against what they called inadequate care by Kuwait’s government. Buses later picked them up, too.

“We were cold, we were hungry, we were thirsty,” complained Ali Abdal, 38, a mechanical engineer, as he marched down the wind-swept macadam. “And we still haven’t seen one person from the Kuwait government.”

The Kuwaitis had been taken from their homes, streets and mosques on Feb. 22 and Feb. 23 as Iraq’s occupation army began sacking Kuwait city in anticipation of the allied ground offensive.

The captives released Friday were the first to be repatriated from among more than 6,200 Ku waitis abducted by Iraq during its seven-month occupation, said Dr. Abdul Rahman Muhailan, a Red Crescent official who helped negotiate their release with Iraqi officials.

He said the officials told him and International Red Cross delegates that Iraq had abducted 4,135 Kuwaiti civilians, military and police between Aug. 2, when they invaded the emirate, and Feb. 22. The Iraqis admitted taking another 2,089 in the final days of the war. The group released Friday were all from this second group, he said.

Kuwaiti officials previously had said that 25,000 people had been abducted. But Kuwait’s prime minister, Crown Prince Saad al Abdullah al Sabah, told a press conference Thursday that only 5,500 to 6,000 Kuwaitis were still in Iraqi prisons.

The figures apparently did not include thousands of Kuwaitis and other prisoners released from Iraqi jails last weekend by Shiite Islamic rebels fighting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime in Basra and other cities, Muhailan said.

It was not immediately clear if initial estimates were too high or if the new figures include Egyptians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and other third-country workers in Kuwait also taken to Iraq.

The Kuwaiti group had spent Thursday night in roadside tents, and in the open desert, just inside Kuwait’s border, in an apparent mix-up over when they would be released.

Muhailan said Iraq had authorized the Red Cross to visit a military prison in Basra, in southern Iraq, on Thursday to formally register and receive the prisoners.

“That’s what they were supposed to do,” he said. “But when the ICRC went to Basra yesterday to meet the government, they couldn’t find anyone. So they came back. And they found all these people on the border. The Iraqis took them here on their own.”

The release was further delayed until 10 a.m. Friday because a count showed an extra seven people; Kuwaiti officials feared the group included Iraqis trying to sneak into Kuwait. The seven were never identified, Muhailan said.

The freed Kuwaitis said they had been jailed in a crowded military prison in Bousukher, a Basra suburb. Unlike Kuwaitis arrested in the months before, none apparently was tortured by their captors. But the incarceration wasn’t easy.

“One man complained he wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom for three days, and the guard ordered him to stand outside in the rain and denied him water for two days,” said Labeed Abdal, 22, a student. “This was after they had lost the war.”

Ahmed Olaimi, 27, a computer technician and graduate of the University of Miami said the uncertainty was the hardest part: “They kept saying you will be released tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow, then tomorrow again. They kept us hoping and dying, hoping and dying. They tortured us mentally.”