Kuwait plans to launch a project to clean up what it calls 'oil lakes', referring to ground contamination resulting from crude spills during the Iraqi invasion in 1990.

'There is an estimated 60 million cubic metres of contaminated soil that needs to be remediated,' Kuwait Oil Company chairman Sami Al Rushaid was quoted as saying in a report in our sister newspaper Gulf Daily News.

Kuwait extinguished the last of many oil well fires in the north in November 1991, eight months after it was liberated. But hundreds of oil lakes also were formed as a result of crude spills from the invasion.