May 13, 2002	Monday	Safar 29, 1423

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BAGRAM AIR BASE, May 12: The British-led coalition forces have made another major weapons discovery in an operation to hunt down Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in eastern Afghanistan, a spokesman said on Sunday.

Colonel Ben Curry said the cache had been discovered on Saturday around four kilometres south of a cave complex where British troops discovered 20 truckloads of ammunition and weaponry two days earlier.

Bomb disposal experts blew most of that cache up and handed over the rest to the Afghan interim administration.

The newly discovered arms dump “contained approximately 60 107mm rockets, 100 82mm mortar rounds and 12 boxes of 12.7mm heavy-machine-gun ammunition,” Curry said.

“This cache was destroyed this morning by a bomb disposal team.

“The thing that alerted us most about this cache was its position. It appeared to be hastily positioned, literally underneath a bush, which I would suggest would make it either a ready-use cache or something that someone ditched while they were moving rapidly away.”

Curry said that weapons had also been found near a major road in eastern Afghanistan.

“A culvert under the main Khost to Gardez road contained a few RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) rounds and some small-arms ammunition. These munitions were destroyed in a controlled demolition.”

The British-led Operation Snipe entered its 15th day on Sunday and Curry said around 80 to 85 per cent of the target area in southeastern Afghanistan had now been covered by the 1,000-odd troops taking part.

There had still been no contact with opposition fighters, he said, but “the search for AQT (Al Qaeda/Taliban) personnel, assets and infrastructure continues.”

ROCKET ATTACK: A rocket was fired at a building housing US agents hunting Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in northwestern Pakistan near the Afghan border, but no casualties were reported, residents said on Sunday.

The rocket landed near the vocational training institute in Miranshah where the Americans were staying, at about 10:25pm Friday, but failed to explode, they said.

Tribal militia officers told reporters the device was defused and no damage was caused, but that a second rocket fitted with a timing device was found in a forest some 200 meters away.

“It was timed to explode around 2:25am the same night. “The ordnance was defused before it went off.”

This was the third rocket attack in Miranshah this month. Last Tuesday a rocket destroyed the boundary wall of the training institute, but no one was injured, local officials said. A similar attack on the same building on May 1 caused minor damage but no casualties.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Taliban sympathisers and religious leaders have demanded the US troops to withdraw from the area.

President Pervez Musharraf has said the US presence in Pakistan is limited to a small number of communications experts supporting Pakistan forces hunting Al-Qaeda fighters and leaders of the Taliban militia.—AFP