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Forensic Experts Check Tora Bora
Tuesday, May 7, 2002
MSNBC News Services

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Pvt. Scott Heffran of Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, emerges from a cave in Tora Bora on Sunday as Pvt. Shane Schofield keeps watch.
Image Credit: Stephen Thorne -- The Associated Press.

The cave entrance had been bombed, probably in December by U.S. aircraft, and had to be reopened, Charron said. It was sealed again after Canadian troops departed. Soldiers said engineers had also tried unsuccessfully to reopen several caves that had been sealed shut by U.S. bombs

MSNBC
Canadian troops and U.S. forensic experts returned from the former al-Qaida stronghold at Tora Bora on Tuesday with DNA samples they hope will identify some of those killed there by U.S. bombs late last year. A Canadian officer said forces had uncovered a graveyard they believe had become a shrine to Islamic martyrdom and where senior al-Qaida lieutenants may be buried.

Osama bin Laden was believed to have fled Tora Bora in December during weeks of heavy bombing as Afghan troops aided by U.S. special forces closed in. But there was also speculation he might have been killed by the U.S. airstrikes.

Military intelligence says bin Laden's last radio signal was intercepted from the area in December.

Canadian Capt. Philip Nicholson said DNA samples were taken from 23 bodies during a three-day sweep of Tora Bora. He said the graves had become a Muslim holy site since the al-Qaida fighters were buried there at the end of December and it was originally believed bin Laden could be among them.

"There can be very little doubt that they are all al-Qaida," Nicholson said, adding the claim was based on local intelligence.

"We did not find anybody who was 6 foot 5," he said, referring to bin Laden. "So (we're) a bit disappointed but I think the DNA sampling will probably turn up all sorts of good results down the road."

U.S. military spokesman Maj. Bryan Hilferty said forensics experts from the Army's criminal investigation department -- the military's FBI equivalent -- accompanied the Canadians.

But Hilferty said they were not searching for specific al-Qaida or Taliban leaders.

"We were not looking for bin Laden or a rotund little one-eyed man either," he said, referring to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

Nicholson said 750 to 1,000 people from all over Afghanistan and possibly neighboring Pakistan turned up for the internment on December 30, according to local Afghan residents.

It then became a site of pilgrimage, he said.

"It's obviously a shrine to Islamic martyrdom," he said.

One prominently marked grave was initially thought to be possibly that of bin Laden but visual inspection of the body within showed that was not the case, the Canadian Press news agency reported. The bodies were reburied in their graves afterward.

* DNA SAMPLES NOT AIM?
* STEPPED-UP SEARCH
(More: MSNBC News Source)
2002 © MSNBC News Services.

Dan