SECURITY is being tightened around British units arriving in Kuwait after senior ministers were shown secret intelligence details of “a credible threat” of terrorist attacks on troops in the next few days.

Islamic militants have already killed two US Marines, wounded two others and were recently foiled in an attempted attack on a British Army convoy as it left a port on the outskirts of Kuwait City.

Kuwaiti forces arrested five Islamic militants yesterday and seized a large amount of weapons and ammunition. An Interior Ministry statement said that the suspects, described as extremists, included four Kuwaitis and one non-Kuwaiti. The men had confessed to weapons training, the statement said, and security forces had found guns, grenades and ammunition.

What concerns US and British military commanders is that many of the suspects arrested for alleged involvement in these attacks have been identified as serving members of the various branches of Kuwait’s security organisations. Some were wearing their uniforms and using their security passes to evade checkpoints and get close to allied military bases.

The ever-increasing volume of military traffic seen clogging Kuwait’s main highways, with British and US convoys transporting equipment to the tens of thousands of newlyarrived troops, is obvious prey for drive-by gunmen.

Khaled Messier al-Shimmari, a policeman, was jailed for 15 years earlier this week for seriously injuring two US soldiers in an ambush before fleeing across the border to Saudi Arabia.

American sentries reported that they were fired on in a drive-by shooting at their camp in Shuaiba on Wednesday. The attack came just hours after police found a cache of weapons and explosives at an abandoned building in the desert at Sabiya.

Some of the weaponry, including grenades and rifles, is understood to have come from military stocks. A US patrol found another arsenal of weapons hidden in a pick-up truck that was stopped at a checkpoint close to a desert road leading to one of the Americans’ main camps.

At the weekend, a 37-year-old first lieutenant with the Kuwaiti National Guard was arrested by Kuwaiti undercover officers after a car chase along the main Gulf Road. The man was caught after he tried to ram his car through the main gates of the National Assembly with 700 rounds of ammunition and weapons in the vehicle.

Police are still investigating three men, serving with the Defence and Interior Ministry security departments, who are charged with plotting attacks on American and British forces at the scores of makeshift bases set up in the northern deserts of Kuwait.

The Interior Ministry has assured British and US commanders that they have purged their security ranks of any militant threat, a promise which allied military officers regard with some scepticism.

One allied commander said: “Security around ports and airports where our equipment and manpower are arriving is the Kuwaiti responsibility.

So, too, are the main roads and hotels where some of our personnel are staying. They don’t exactly fill you with confidence.”

British commanders have not yet been given the full details of the abortive attack on an Army convoy last month as it left Shuwaikh port.

A Kuwaiti undercover unit spotted a car containing four men as it accelerated through traffic. They intervened as the vehicle tried to cut across the slow-moving convoy, led by a British Land Rover, on the dual carriageway.

The suspect car veered away and crashed as it tried to escape. But only the driver, a Kuwaiti man, was captured. The three others fled, including the leader of the alleged terrorist cell, whom the driver identified as a Saudi Arabian.

As the colossal allied military build-up continues, there are daily warnings from local Islamic groups about attacks, which are being taken seriously because of the amount of weaponry freely available in this country.

The Kuwaiti Government has admitted to the presence of al-Qaeda units operating inside its borders, but it is equally concerned about local groups which, although not linked to Osama bin Laden’s network, share his violent ambitions towards the Western force massed on Iraq’s border.

Security officials say that last week there was an attempted hijack of a Kuwait Airlines jet by an Afghan man whose identity has not been released. Officials say that an off-duty Kuwaiti Army officer foiled the hijack of the aircraft, which was carrying the country’s United Nations delegate to the capital for discussions about a new resolution. Evidence of increasing militancy is also being seen daily in the capital with gangs of Islamic extremists preventing families from entering shopping malls in Kuwait City. The gangs are protesting about “the corruption of men and women shopping together” and of Western culture polluting their Islamic society.

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