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U.S. planes bomb Paktia province
KABUL, JAN. 7. British paratroopers arrived in Kabul to bolster a foreign security force as tribal elders met in east Afghanistan today to decide what to do with a teenager believed to have shot the first U.S. soldier killed in the war.
U.S. jets prowled the skies overhead, bombing parts of Paktia province where Osama bin Laden once ran training camps and where he or his Al-Qaeda fighters may have taken refuge, the private Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said. U.S. helicopters landed in the area near the Zawara training camp, delivering U.S. ground troops for a search operation for remnants of Al-Qaeda and the vanquished Taliban militia that ruled Afghanistan until November, AIP said.
Afghan tribal elders were meeting in Khost in Paktia province to decide the fate of a 14-year-old boy suspected of killing a U.S. soldier, sources in the Pakistani border town of Miranshah said. At a tribal Jirga (council) in Khost, the elders are to decide whether to hand over the teenager to the U.S. military, said the sources with contacts in neighbouring Khost. The slain special forces soldier, identified as Sergeant 1st class Nathan Ross Chapman (31), of San Antonio, Texas, last week became the first U.S. military casualty from hostile fire in the country, apparently killed in an ambush. The soldier was part of a 25-member fact-finding mission in Paktia province to verify reports by locals that U.S. planes had hit civilian targets in Khost's Mata Chinah area, AIP reported. A CIA agent was wounded in last Friday's exchange of fire. Two Afghan escorts were also wounded.
Pakistan's Nawa-I-Waqt newspaper reported that eight U.S. helicopters landed in Khost yesterday, bringing in army officials who were surveying the area and examining caves for signs of the presence of Osama bin Laden. U.S. troops have been searching cave complexes of the Al-Qaeda network in the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan, earlier shattered by U.S. bombing, and also around Khost.
Searchers had found heavy weapons, including one or two tanks, inside some of the caves, officials have said. Gardez is west of Khost, an area that was raked by U.S. bombs last week and where Osama training camps came under attack by cruise missiles in 1998 after the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
- Reuters
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