American Tells of Ordeal as Iraqi Captive : Kuwait: Hope withered as he was led away at gunpoint and issued a prison uniform. But he was freed unharmed.

KUWAIT — An American bomb-disposal expert, free in Kuwait after Iraqi police seized him in a border dispute, blinked back tears Sunday as he described a terrifying ordeal, but he said he was not harmed.

Chad Hall, released Saturday after two days in Iraq, said his hopes for a quick and peaceful resolution of the dispute withered as he was led away at gunpoint, then taken to Baghdad and issued a prison uniform.

Hall’s seizure Thursday afternoon in a disputed section of the Iraq-Kuwait border had raised tensions ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November. There had been speculation that Baghdad was trying to provoke President Bush, who is trailing in the polls behind Democrat Bill Clinton, but Iraq blamed the incident on “confusion” along the unmarked frontier.

The United Nations took custody of Hall in Baghdad on Saturday and flew him to their border headquarters at Umm Qasr for a medical examination Sunday before flying him to Kuwait.

Hall was taken to the U.S. Embassy after U.N. officials who escorted him from Iraq turned him over to Ambassador Edward W. Gnehm Jr. at Kuwait International Airport.

Pale and weary, Hall described how an Iraqi colonel had threatened to shoot him at the border and security forces in Baghdad had interrogated him about his family.

Still, he said, he was not mistreated. “I am probably the only guy in captivity who gained weight,” quipped the 50-year-old Hall, who carries about 220 pounds on a 6-foot-1-inch frame.

Hall, a retired U.S. Army major, said a Pakistani co-worker tried to win his release by telling his captors he was an American general. That put an end to the friendly banter, and an Iraqi colonel went to his car and emerged with a pistol, Hall told reporters at the U.S. Embassy.

“I have the authority to shoot you if I have to, in order to take you with me,” Hall quoted him as saying.

The American said his captors headed for Basra, and not to their headquarters at nearby Umm Qasr, as he had been told. From Basra, he was moved to Baghdad, where he was searched and questioned for the first time, and issued a prison uniform.

“My heart dropped at that point because I thought I was in for a very long term in Iraq, based on what had happened to the others,” Hall said.

Two Britons and three Swedes arrested in the disputed zone in the last three months were each sentenced to seven years in prison for illegally entering the country.

Hall said he saw no other prisoners while in captivity.

Spokeswoman Cynthia Orms of Environmental Health Research & Testing, Hall’s Lexington, Ky., employer, said Hall planned to take a commercial flight to Texas to see his family. He is expected to return to his job in Kuwait at an unscheduled date, she said.

Hall was disposing of unexploded mines and other ammunition in a section of Kuwait that had belonged to Iraq until a U.N. panel redrew the border and assigned the territory to Kuwait.

Iraq does not recognize the new border, which has shifted oil wells and farmland to the country it overran in 1990.

In the past, however, Baghdad has not always been aware of arrests by its forces along the disputed border.