Six Iraqis Arrested For Spying For Kuwait, Government Reports

Security authorities have arrested six Iraqis who spied for Kuwait, the state-run television network reported Thursday night.

“They were intending to harm the security of Iraq and to harm the U.N. monitors who work on the Iraq-Kuwait border,” the government said in a statement.

Four of the men were shown on TV after their interrogation, but no details of their arrest were reported.

The TV report said all six Iraqis had apparently been recruited by a Kuwaiti intelligence officer, identified as Mohammed Yousef al-Qondari, in Jordan.

It did not say when that occurred, but said the men had been spying for six months. The TV said they regularly met the Kuwaiti officer on Iraq’s southern border with the emirate.

One of the men shown on television, identified as Ali Kamel Yassir, said the Kuwaitis “required information on military movements in southern Iraq, including the deployment of Saddam Hussein’s elite Republican Guard divisions and what weapons they had.

“I knew from the kind of information they required that they also were interested in the fate of the Kuwaitis reported missing in Iraq,” Yassir said during the 45-minute broadcast.

Kuwait claims that about 600 of its citizens seized after Iraq invaded the emirate in August 1990 remain in Iraqi prisons. The Iraqis, driven out of the emirate by a U.S.-led coalition after a seven-month occupation, claims it holds no Kuwaitis.

The other men were named as Zaghair Aboud Mohammed, Rasoul Nama Faragh, Mahmoud Daoud Salman, Ali Jabar Shendi and Adil Alwan Lafta.

They said, according to the report, that they had been ordered to “get information on ships arriving in Umm Qasr port” in southern Iraq “and information on the economic situation in Iraq.”

Mohammed said they had been given weapons by Kuwait to attack U.N. cease-fire monitors on the Iraq-Kuwait border and make it look like the Iraqis were to blame. He said no attacks were carried out.