U.S. troops destroy giant weapons cache

More ammo dumps found

A U.S. soldier searches a room in a village's mud compound Sunday in southeastern Afghanistan.

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KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (CNN) -- U.S. troops Wednesday exploded the largest cache of bombs found so far in Afghanistan.

Officers from the 63rd Ordnance Battalion said 417 bombs totaling 124,135 pounds were exploded. Soldiers used 34,000 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives to set off the blast.

There were three kinds of bombs in the cache, including Russian-made cluster bombs, officials said.

U.S. officials said the cache was discovered early in Operation Enduring Freedom. The decision was made only recently to destroy it, and preparations had been going on for past two weeks.

Afghan officials said the Taliban tried to hide the bombs last November about 14 kilometers southeast of the Kandahar airport near the Durie River in advance of approaching opposition forces.

Two nearby villages were evacuated temporarily and a portion of Highway 4 between Kandahar and Spin Boldak was closed during the blast.

Earlier in the day, a military spokesman announced that U.S. special operations forces Tuesday uncovered another large weapons cache in the eastern part of the country. The troops were searching for Taliban and al Qaeda holdouts.

According to Col. Roger King, more than 500,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition were found inside two tunnels on a farm in Oruzgan province near the town of Deh Rawud.

The ammunition was enough to fill three large commercial trucks.

Fighting positions and bunkers were also discovered on the property. These were destroyed along with the tunnels where the munitions were found.

The discovery was the latest in a series of large-scale weapons caches unearthed by U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan.

Late last month U.S. troops seized a cache of weapons, documents and other items, including a model of a Boeing 757 jetliner, in southeastern Afghanistan near the city of Khowst.

In addition, special operations troops discovered a rocket-propelled grenade launcher with 50 grenades, a Russian-made machine gun, "a large bag carrying official documents" -- including a pass for crossing the border into Pakistan, where large numbers of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters are believed to have taken refuge.

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