Summary Executions Still Occurring in Kuwait : Human rights: Victims are Palestinians and other suspected collaborators of Iraq. ‘The government is ‘not in control,’ the Red Cross says.

By the time the police arrived Thursday afternoon, the bullet-riddled body had lain in Raed Youssef Njeibel’s garbage-strewn side yard for three long days.

The smell was bad enough. The body count was worse.

“This is the third body they have dumped here,” said the 20-year-old Kuwaiti student. But he added, “If they were brought here, it means they were guilty and were investigated.”

The incident was the latest in what increasingly appears a campaign of terror against Palestinians and others suspected of collaboration during Iraq’s brutal seven-month occupation of this Persian Gulf emirate.

Despite repeated government denials and behind-the-scenes efforts to stop the abuses, local doctors and international human rights officials say beatings, torture and summary executions continue 24 days after Kuwait’s liberation by allied forces.

“There is an immediate and urgent situation,” Andrew Whitley, executive director of Middle East Watch, a New York-based human rights group, told reporters Thursday.

He cited “considerable evidence of mistreatment . . . very similar to that perpetrated by Iraq on Kuwaitis.” However, he said, the abuses are on a “considerably lesser scale.”

Citing medical and morgue records, as well as interviews, Whitley estimated that 30 to 40 people have been killed and 400 to 500 beaten or tortured. Roughly 2,000 remain in detention, he said.

The government has refused to say how many people were arrested at checkpoints and during early sweeps of Palestinian neighborhoods. No independent figures are available since the International Committee of the Red Cross has not visited any prisons, contending that the government so far is unable to assure unrestricted access.

“The problem is the government is not in control,” said Walter Stocker, the Red Cross’ head delegate. He said it is still unclear who is holding the prisoners or under what authority.

In some cases, men in Kuwaiti military uniforms have beaten Palestinians in hospitals or denied them appropriate medical treatment after torture, the officials said.

“It is still going on,” said a senior doctor at Mubarak al Kabeer Hospital, the country’s largest. “We’ve seen a lot of these patients, but we’re not supposed to talk about it.”

The doctor, who asked not to be identified, estimated that 50 to 60 torture or beating victims had been brought to the hospital emergency room in the last three weeks.

Last week, he said, soldiers demanded that a Kuwaiti surgeon, not a resident Palestinian doctor, treat a Palestinian man whose hand had been fractured in three places.

“There was no Kuwaiti here at the time,” the doctor said. “So he was not treated for two days.”

He said soldiers keep the injured under armed guard in a former orthopedic ward. “We are prevented from going there,” he said.

In one case shortly after liberation, according to a paramedic, soldiers continued to beat two Palestinian men after they had brought them to the emergency room.

“Even the Kuwaiti doctors said, ‘What is this? You beat and torture them? This is like the days of the Iraqis,’ ” said the paramedic, who witnessed the incident.

In another case, Bilal Khatab, a 19-year-old Palestinian student, said soldiers arrested him when he went to Mubarak Hospital to visit a friend March 10. He said they took him to a room near the emergency room, blindfolded him and beat him with a stick for several hours.

“He said, ‘Why you live in Kuwait? Why you stay in Kuwait?’ ” Khatab recalled. “I said, ‘I live here. I work here. I was born here.’ ”

Khatab said the soldiers accused him of being a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which supported Iraq during the war. Before he was released, he said, they made him lick their shoes and bark like a dog.

“They say, ‘No, this is not a dog. It is Yasser Arafat and the PLO,’ ” Khatab recalled in a friend’s apartment in the Salymiya district.

Mubarak doctors identified another man, killed four days ago, as a Palestinian active in the PLO. A reporter found his body under a highway bridge.

Many survivors say they were beaten in schools and police stations. Officials say three groups now appear most responsible.

Armed street toughs known as the Young Sabahs have acted as vigilantes, despite warnings from Kuwait’s crown prince last weekend that they will be hanged if they continue. At least some members of this group are now under house arrest, according to a Western diplomat.

The second group consists of former members of the resistance, many with scores to settle against alleged collaborators. The third group is the so-called “rogue military”--soldiers and officers working from police stations and schools and acting against orders from army commanders.

In an effort to curb the abuses, the Ministry of Justice this week assigned aides to every police station. And U.S. Special Forces troops, who are working to help integrate the resistance into the Kuwaiti army, have halted beatings several times, U.S. officials said.

At the press conference, Whitley said he had “no evidence” that government leaders were “organizing or condoning” rights abuses.

But Whitley said he had “no doubt” that senior members of the military were involved, since prisoners are being held in brigade, division and headquarters prisons.

“They are detaining people, and torture is taking place in places where senior officers are present,” he said. On Wednesday, Kuwait’s outgoing foreign minister, Sheik Sabah al Ahmed al Sabah, denied to diplomats during a briefing that such abuses were taking place.

“He (Sabah) said, ‘There’ve been these stories of atrocities against Palestinians,’ ” according to a Western diplomat who took notes of the briefing.

“He said, ‘I’ve talked to my colleagues . . . and there is no truth to such rumors. There are of course incidents that could happen anywhere. But nothing like that which has been heard in the media reports,’ ” the diplomat related. “To which there was no comment,” he added dryly.

The body found Thursday was in the Shaab residential district, in a dusty field littered with dead cats, garbage and spent machine-gun shells. The palace used by Iraq’s first and most brutal occupation administrator here, Hassan Majeed, is down the street, which may account for the use of the field.

Njeibel said that all three bodies were dumped after midnight and that all had been shot elsewhere first. A friend who slept in his house, he said, saw four men in uniforms dump the last body out of a white Chevrolet.

As an emaciated dog sniffed at the fly-covered blanket where the body had lain, the student said he had little sympathy for collaborators or patience for due process.

“It is the right of Kuwaiti people to do even more than this,” he said.