KABUL, AFGHANISTAN - In a joint operation with Afghan police, international peacekeepers discovered a cache of 151 Chinese-made rockets, the same kind fired at allied security forces over the weekend, a peacekeeping spokesman said Thursday. <br>
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Flight Lt. Joel Fall said the 107 mm rockets were found Wednesday on the road that runs north from Kabul to Bagram, where U.S. troops are based. <br>
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Fall called the find ``significant'' and said the rockets would be destroyed by a team of bomb disposal experts. <br>
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``If we find any rockets at all it's quite a major thing,'' Fall said. <br>
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Two of the same kind of missiles were fired Sunday on a compound housing peacekeepers in Kabul, the first such attack since international troops began patrolling the capital last year. <br>
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There were no casualties in that attack, but peacekeepers said they thought it was part of a campaign to destabilize the administration of interim leader Hamid Karzai ahead of a June meeting of the loya jirga, a national council that will select a new government. <br>
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On Wednesday, authorities said they had arrested five suspects in connection with the rocket attack. The five men lived in a neighborhood in eastern Kabul where police found four other Chinese-made rockets aimed at peacekeepers after the Sunday attack. <br>
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Afghan security forces on Wednesday also launched a house-to-house search operation in several districts of the capital that turned up grenades, fuses, ammunition and anti-personnel mines, Fall said. Some 400 police were involved in the pre-dawn sweep, but Fall said he was not aware of any arrests. The deputy peacekeeping commander was present as an observer, he said. <br>
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Peacekeepers have been targeted in shooting incidents before, but never by rockets. Peacekeepers have said they believed disgruntled and unpaid northern alliance soldiers or common criminals were behind some of the attacks. <br>
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The 18-nation, 4,500-member force is responsible for maintaining security in Kabul.
