By B Izzak

KUWAIT: Leading opposition MP Shuaib Al-Muwaizri yesterday called on the National Assembly Speaker Marzouq Al-Ghanem to convene an emergency session to debate allegations that "saboteurs" were plotting against the country. In a letter Muwaizri sent to the Speaker, he said that the Speaker revealed in a speech in the assembly last week that some people were plotting to sabotage and destabilize the country and that a decision had been taken by corrupt people and thieves of public funds to unseat His Highness the Prime Minister.

'Extremely serious'
Muwaizri added that such claims are extremely serious and pose a threat to the country and the Kuwaiti people and therefore an urgent special assembly session must be held and televised live to the public to expose and discredit those traitors and hold them to account.

The lawmaker said that the speaker should not wait for the request to be signed by 10 MPs as required by the internal charter to convene a special session and should invoke his constitutional powers to call for the session immediately.

Ghanem's claims were made last week during a lengthy speech in which he tackled a large number of highly sensitive issues including the issue of stateless people or bedoons, the presence of thousands of Kuwaitis with fake citizenship and others.

Asked to comment on Muwaizri's letter, Ghanem told reporters that he will comment later as he and many lawmakers were still busy with the Palestinian issue. The speaker has just returned from an Arab parliamentary meeting where he strongly rejected the US-sponsored peace plan called the "deal of the century" and threw a copy of the plan in a dustbin.

Bedoons' rights
Meanwhile, head of the assembly's human rights committee MP Adel Al-Damkhi called yesterday for giving priority to debate a draft law that provides tens of thousands of bedoons basic humanitarian rights ahead of finding a fair solution to their decades-old plight.

He said that the report of the committee on the draft law is on the agenda of the assembly and that 29 MPs have demanded giving it priority but so far it has not been debated. Damkhi called for employing bedoons in government jobs where there are not enough Kuwaitis. The lawmaker said that the main object is to find a fair solution for some 100,000 bedoons living in the country and there is no need to exchange accusations.

Damkhi was speaking to reporters after visiting the central jail. He said there will be new good decisions regarding those jailed for expressing opinion, adding that he met with a number of prisoners for writing tweets deemed offensive. In the meantime, MP Abdullah Al-Kandari yesterday asked the Minister of Finance Mariam Al-Aqeel about alleged bribes in the Airbus deal.