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CNN Live At Daybreak

Canadian Soldiers Back From Three-Day Mission in Tora Bora

Aired May 07, 2002 - 05:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Canadian soldiers are now back from a three-day mission in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan. It was dubbed Operation Torii.

And our Ryan Chilcote joins us live from Bagram air base in Afghanistan to explain the objective of this mission -- good morning.

RYAN CHILCOTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning.

Well, actually, I just got back from Operation Torii. Operation Torii was a Canadian-led mission that involved more than 400 coalition troops. And the goal of that mission was nothing less than to perhaps find the remains and identify the remains of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders.

Now you might be saying, whoa, why Osama bin Laden? Why his remains? Why Tora Bora, and why now?

Well you might recall that back in December there was some very heavy fighting in the Tora Bora area that involved some very heavy U.S. bombing. The U.S. intelligence community believes that it heard Osama bin Laden on a Walkie-Talkie in that area. Parts of the U.S. intelligence community believe that is the last time they heard from Osama bin Laden.

The idea of this mission was that perhaps Osama bin Laden -- if that was the last time they heard from him -- was killed in that bombing. And if he was, perhaps his remains are still there and they can find them. Because obviously there's nothing more than the coalition against terror would like to do than to find and identify the remains of Osama bin Laden.

COSTELLO: Oh, Ryan, I'm sorry. I thought you had a sound byte from someone coming up. So this mission was specifically designed to find Osama bin Laden?

CHILCOTE: Yeah. Specifically, they were looking at a cave complex in the Tora Bora area. And, specifically, one cave that the U.S. military identified as cave number four. Actually, they previously called it cave number three, but it doesn't matter.

You should see that video now. And as you can see, it is now a closed cave -- if there ever was a cave there -- with a waterfall in front of it. Now just to explain, there was a predator spy ship -- a U.S. predator spy ship -- back in December in that area. And it saw a group of what it believes to be 40 to 70 al Qaeda fighters run into what was then there a cave.

It then called in strikes and a U.S. gun ship shelled it, and a B-1 bomber bombed it. So the idea was that with such a large group of al Qaeda fighters, perhaps Osama bin Laden was with them. And these troops wanted to get in that cave and look for remains.

Now as you can see, it's all closed up. And the demolition work you see, the explosive work that you see there, is actually Canadian troops trying to blow their way back into the cave. Now they did not succeed in finding a cave in there and blowing their way into any cave. There was just too much rubble.

What did happen was some villagers from that area came up to them and said, "You know, right after the fighting we buried 25 Arab fighters in a local graveyard." Well that obviously got the interest of the FBI investigator and investigator from the U.S. Army's criminal investigations defense bureau. And they went to that grave site and actually excavated those graves and took DNA samples from the corpses of 23 bodies there.

COSTELLO: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) stuff, but necessary -- thank you. Ryan Chilcote reporting live for us from Bagram air base with some interesting information -- thank you.

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