An explosion rocked an empty shopping mall on the waterfront in the Kuwaiti capital early today, sending a huge plume of white smoke towering into the night sky. Kuwaiti officials said a missile that had landed in the water nearby was responsible.

Witnesses who gathered shortly after the explosion at 1:45 a.m. local time could see a twisted piece of metal on the esplanade near the shoreline about the size of a wastebasket and bearing the number "5420" in red. The words "place" and "protractor" could also be made out on a shard. Emergency workers put those and other fragments in white bags that they took away for analysis.

Despite indications that a missile had struck the water near the rear entrance to the Sharq mall, by the Sharqiah cinema, witnesses reported hearing no air-raid sirens before the blast that would have indicated an incoming missile.

Some Kuwaiti officials who examined the fragments said they believed the missile was actually an errant American cruise missile that had been fired from the Persian Gulf toward Iraq.

"It was an American cruise missile, we know from the markings and writing on it," said a Kuwaiti police colonel who did not give his name. "It doesn't go up, it comes in low from the sea, and that's why there was no alert."

Another uniformed Kuwaiti official said that he, too, believed the missile to have been American and said that it that "came from the sea." He then added that "it was a mistake, it was a mistake" that it had struck Kuwait.

In Washington, the chief Pentagon spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, asked about reports that Kuwaiti officials were blaming an American missile for the damage, said it was too early to tell what had happened or whose missile it was.

The proof is there, which deduction does it support.