‘Nothing Much Will Happen’ to 2 Arrested Americans, Iraq Says

The No. 2 official in Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime acknowledged Saturday that Iraq was holding two Americans who crossed the border from Kuwait, but said, “Nothing much will happen to them.”

The two men, identified by Defense Secretary William J. Perry as employees of McDonnell Douglas Corp., were arrested Monday night by Iraqi police. Their whereabouts and condition were unknown, despite intensive diplomatic efforts to track them down.

Perry, who was visiting Saudi Arabia, said the two men are in no danger.

In the first official Iraqi comment on their disappearance, Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan told Associated Press Television: “The borders must have some respect. There are rules and laws. Surely it will be taken into consideration in dealing with any person that does not respect the laws of the country.”

Ramadan did not say where the Americans are being held or whether they would be put on trial.

But he hinted at possible linkage to Baghdad’s drive to get the U.N. Security Council to lift crippling trade sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August, 1990.

“I think those two, you’re not supposed to give them more attention than the 20 million Iraqis that the American Administration is working to kill . . . by starving them to death and making them sick,” he said.

The United States has blocked efforts in the Security Council by Russia and France to consider an easing of the oil embargo, which has wrecked Iraq’s economy and caused hardship for the Iraqi people.

The two Americans were arrested Monday night after they crossed into Iraq from Kuwait to visit friends in a Danish engineering unit attached to the U.N. observer mission, U.N. officials said. The U.N. mission was established after the 1991 Gulf War.