By Abdullah Al-Mesri
KUWAIT, Aug 8 (KUNA) -- Today's handover of human remains said to belong to Kuwaitis who had been missing or held as prisoners is follow-up to a previous declaration by a Kuwaiti laboratory about positive results after examining samples that had been brought from Baghdad, a Kuwaiti official indicated.
Rabie Al-Adsani, the head of the Kuwaiti delegation at the international tripartite commission and sub-committee tasked with the POWs file, said that in light of the positive results, Kuwait had addressed an official request to the Iraqi authorities to transfer the human remains to Kuwait to complete the examination at the Interior Ministry's department of criminal evidences.
The Ministry of Interior department keeps a DNA database for the Kuwaiti POWs, thus it will conduct a test to determine whether the samples match, Al-Adsani has explained further.
Al-Adsani explained that the DNA extraction for examination is a very complex and time consuming process.
He expressed gratitude to the Iraqi authorities namely the ministry of defense, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN mission, members of the technical committee from Saudi Arabia, the US, the UK and France for their cooperation and fruitful efforts that led "to these positive results." The ICRC-affiliated tripartite commission declared in June discovery of human remains in Al-Muthanna, Al-Samawa, in southern Iraq, saying that they were suspected to belong to Kuwaiti prisoners.
The committee had said that the bones were handed over to forensic department in Baghdad indicaing that the DNA to be extracted from the skeletons would be compared to those of relatives of the missing persons.
Iraqi authorities had handed over to Kuwait DNA samples for 32 corpses.
In 2005, remains of Kuwaitis were located. The tripartite commission continues to look for missing peoples in the two countries related to the period of the 1990-1991 occupation. (pickup previous) am.rk