Kuwait: We confiscated a ship from Iraq carrying children's foodstuffs

The Kuwaiti Ministry of the Interior said on Monday that the authorities had confiscated in its territorial waters an Indian ship coming from Iraq loaded with 250 tonnes of items for children for a trader in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates.

Kuwaiti officials stated that naval security men seized on Monday at dawn the ship called the Nourani, which was transporting children's food, talcum powder and cotton, adding that this ship, which is now anchored in Doha port in northern Kuwait, sailed from Basra port in southern Iraq, heading for Dubai.

The captain of the ship, Haidar Ali Hussein, told the AFP that he received 125,000 Iraqi dinars (US $63) from Iraqi traders for transporting this commodity to a merchant in Dubai.

He added that the ship carried out several trips between al-Basra and Dubai in both directions several times since the beginning of the current year.

Meanwhile Iraqi sources in the Iraqi Ministry of Information disputed the Kuwaiti account, saying that the ship was traveling to Iraq, not from it.

The Kuwaiti authorities had earlier announced confiscation of Iraqi ships loading commodities from the Gulf while violating the embargo imposed on Iraq since its occupation of Kuwait in 1990.

The decision to announce the confiscation of the ship came upon the release of a report by UNICEF which said that the rate of deaths among children in Iraq since the UN embargo has doubled and that half a million Iraqi children have died after the end of the Gulf war.