- KUWAIT CITY - A
command tent at the 101st Airborne Division camp in Kuwait was attacked
early Sunday with grenades, and 14 soldiers were wounded, four seriously,
military officials said. An American soldier was detained as a suspect,
the Army said.
-
- The soldier is assigned to the 101st Airborne, and the
motive in the attack "most likely was resentment," said Max Blumenfeld,
a U.S. Army spokesman. He did not elaborate.
-
- Ten of those wounded had superficial wounds, including
puncture wounds to their arms and legs from fragments of the grenade, said
George Heath, civilian spokesman for the 101st's home base at Fort Campbell,
Ky.
-
- Helicopters evacuated 11 to Army hospitals, Blumenfeld
said.
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- The attack at 1:30 a.m. (5:30 p.m. EST Saturday) apparently
used only grenades. It took place in the command center of the 101st Division's
1st Brigade at Camp Pennsylvania, Blumenfeld said. The command tent, the
tactical operations center, runs 24 hours a day and would always be staffed
by officers and senior enlisted personnel, Blumenfeld said.
-
- Names of the wounded were not released, and Blumenfeld
did not say if any high-ranking officers were hurt.
-
- The suspect is an engineer from the engineer platoon
that was attached to one of the infantry battalions, said Col. Frederick
B. Hodges, the 1st Brigade's commander.
-
- The suspect, whose name was not released, has not been
charged, Blumenfeld said. Investigators do not yet know if others were
involved, Blumenfeld said.
-
- However, Heath said two Middle Eastern men were detained.
He said they had been hired as contractors working for the Army at that
camp.
-
- Earlier, Heath said the attack appeared to have been
carried out by terrorists. Military officials had said the attacker used
two grenades and small-arms fire.
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- Camp Pennsylvania is a rear base camp of the 101st, near
the Iraqi border. Kuwait is the main launching point for the tens of thousands
of ground forces -- including parts of the 101st -- who have entered Iraq.
-
- Near Camp New York, another encampment in Kuwait, a Patriot
missile hit an incoming missile near, a military official said, speaking
on condition of anonymity. There were no reports of injuries or where debris
from the missile might have landed. Camp New York, which is near Camp Pennsylvania,
was the largest of the desert staging camps.
-
- Jim Lacey, a correspondent for Time magazine, told CNN
that he was about 20 yards away when explosions at Camp Pennsylvania went
off at what he said were two tents that housed division leadership.
-
- "The people who did it ran off into the darkness,"
he said.
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- He said he interviewed an Army major who was sitting
outside the tent. "He said he saw the grenade roll by him," Lacey
said.
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- After the attack, troops fanned out around the compound
to find the perpetrators, Lacey said.
-
- "We tried to get accountability for everybody,"
Hodges told Britain's Sky News television. "We noticed that this sergeant
was unaccounted for. We found him hiding here in one of these bunkers.
He is detained and he is being interrogated right now."
-
- The 101st Airborne is a rapid deployment group trained
to go anywhere in the world within 36 hours. The roughly 22,000 members
of the 101st were deployed Feb. 6. The last time the entire division was
deployed was during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which began after Iraq invaded
neighboring Kuwait.
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- Most recently, it hunted suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda
fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan. Its exploits are followed in
Kentucky with much pride.
-
- News of the attack at the camp compounded the anxiety
of relatives of the division's soldiers.
-
- "I get a little worried but when I think I should
be crying, I'm not," said Chelsey Payne of Clarksville, Tenn., whose
husband, Sgt. Robert Payne, is with the division. "I just don't get
scared about my own husband, I just know that he's a good soldier and he's
coming home. He promised me."
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- Kuwait is the main launching point for the tens of thousands
of ground forces who have entered Iraq. Before the war with Iraq broke
out, Americans had come under attack four times in the oil-rich emirate
since October. Three of the attacks were blamed on Muslim extremists.
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