As the US cranked up its bombing campaign in Afghanistan another notch, troubles continued on the home front with the death on Wednesday of a fourth person, a New York woman, from anthrax, said reports.
The Pentagon said its warplanes had been carpet-bombing Taliban strongholds north of the capital Kabul using improved intelligence for targeting, partly from American troops on the ground, according to Reuters.
Several hundred US troops have been reported in Afghanistan, but the details of their deployment are still largely being kept under wraps.
Witnesses told the agency they saw a wall of orange flame and huge clouds of dust from the bombs, and counted as many as 100 explosions after a B-52 bomber dropped its load on Taliban positions overlooking Bagram airbase.
The US has ridiculed Taliban's reports of hundreds of civilian casualties from such attacks, despite confirmations, in some cases by the UN, of off-target explosions.
According to Reuters, the airbase is the spot from which the opposition Northern Alliance is anxious to begin an offensive against Kabul.
The Pentagon said Rumsfeld would travel on Friday to Moscow and the region near Afghanistan to discuss the war, said the agency.
``We have many more targets now. I think today we're up to something like 80 percent of all of our sorties are focused on the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces and the only way that could be done is if the people on the ground were providing much better target information,'' US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview on NBC television.
ANTHRAX DEATH SHAKES NYC
Investigators began probing Wednesday how a New York City hospital worker with no known ties to the Postal Service or the media became infected with anthrax and died, according ABCNews Online.
The latest victim, Kathy T. Nguyen, who worked in the stockroom at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, died at 1:16am Wednesday, CNN reported.
"We don't have progress to report at this time," Attorney General John Ashcroft told reporters at a briefing, cited by CNN.
He said investigators were still trying to determine the source of the anthrax found in three letters and many government buildings. More than a dozen people have fallen ill and four have died since the wave of anthrax attacks began in the US, added the network.
Authorities do not yet know if the anthrax attacks are part of a coordinated campaign of germ warfare, although officials say they might be related to Osama bin Laden, the alleged author of the Sept. 11 suicide attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, according to Reuters.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said a no-fly zone around US nuclear plants had been expanded as a result of the latest national security alert issued on Monday by Ashcroft, which anticpated more attacks soon, said the agency - Albawaba.com
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