KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan — The explosion that killed journalist Michelle Lang and four Canadian soldiers last Wednesday was so massive that the 23-ton armoured vehicle that they were riding in was turned upside down and landed facing in the opposite direction.
"The vehicle flipped completely on its top about 10 metres away from the crater, off the road," Lt.-Col. Roch Pelletier, chief of operations for the Canadian brigade in Kandahar, said in an interview Monday.
"They probably managed to put the (improvised explosive device) under the road by digging a tunnel. It was something that was put in place a few days earlier. It was not a hasty IED, as we call them. It was deliberately planned ahead and took a long time to place . . . They dug it, they placed it properly. It was all set up."
There was no way that sentries on what was a routine patrol could have seen the IED buried on a muddy dirt road, Pelletier said, adding that the crews had carried out checks for "patterns of life," to see if people were behaving normally. There were no reports of anything unusual.
In military parlance, the IED was an HME or homemade explosive device, Pelletier said. While declining to say how big it was because of security concerns and because the incident remained the subject of an intensive investigation, he said it was "a large IED" of a type "they normally use. It was standard tactics. There was nothing new."..
Citing security reasons, the military would not say what kind of detonator that may have been used to trigger the explosion...
Reports this weekend on a U.S. blog [emphasis added] about the war [emphasis added] in Afghanistan suggested that Canadian Forces had not provided details of the explosion because it was trying to cover up that it took as much as three hours to free one of those in the blast from the wreckage. Pelletier emphatically denied there was any kind of coverup.
"That is not the case at all," he said. "To extract them we called casevac and we did that quite fast.
"The casualties were here (Kandahar Airfield), most of them, within 30 minutes. The deceased, who are normally extracted later, were back after about an hour" because the wounded are always given priority and moved first...
Those who heard or saw the blast and were interviewed on Monday by an Afghan cameraman working for a joint CBC/Canwest Global pool, expressed no regrets over its lethal consequences. Nine NATO helicopters had quickly arrived over the scene, they said. This had scared them and their children as they feared they would be blamed for what had happened and would come under attack from the air...
Notwithstanding last week's horrific attack, security had been relatively good in that area, the 38-year old infantryman said.
"We are having success with those projects and with the civilians there because we employ them, so they turn in a lot of IEDs and provide us with quite good information on the insurgents," he said.
As a result of this, the insurgents were "being pushed right now by their commander to prove themselves," he said. "One of them tried to prove himself by going for a big hit."
Within 24 hours of the explosion, patrols from the PRT had returned to the same area, Pelletier said.
"It is not fun the day it happens, but the day after it was business as usual because we have to take care of these projects."
