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The United Nations Security Council on Thursday called for greater efforts to discover the whereabouts of more than 600 persons missing since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait nearly 13 years ago.
"Members of the council prompt all states, organizations and individuals, that can support the ongoing investigations, to step up their efforts and provide information that can lead to discovering the whereabouts of the 605 missing Kuwaitis and other nationals," said Aguilar Zinser, president of the Security Council,after a council meeting.
The Security Council met on Thursday morning to hear a report on the fate of the missing Kuwaitis and other nationals.
In his report, UN coordinator Yuli Vorontsov noted that he had been allowed to visit Baghdad for the first time on Jan. 18, but efforts to resolve the missing persons question had since been interrupted by the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Eight days ago, Kuwait offered a one-million-dollar reward for "authentic" information on the fate of the 605 people who it says disappeared during the seven-month occupation that followed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
Most of the missing are Kuwaiti nationals, but authorities in Kuwait City say 14 Saudis, five Egyptians, five Iranians, four Syrians, three Lebanese, one Bahraini, one Omani and one Indian also vanished, mostly into Iraqi jails.
In his report, Vorontsov noted that a committee charged with looking into the fate of missing persons also met for the first time on Jan. 8 and had held four other meetings since then. However, "no concrete results have been achieved," he said.
Vorontsov, a former Russian ambassador to the United States, was appointed UN coordinator for missing Kuwaitis and third-party nationals on Feb. 14, 2000.
(Xinhua News Agency April 25, 2003)
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