Kabba Drilling To Assess Potential  

VANCOUVER, BC - Bell Copper Corporation reported that Major Drilling of Salt Lake City, Utah has been engaged to advance drillhole K-9 at the Company's Kabba project in Mohave County, Arizona. Major Drilling is now on the drill site, mobilizing a truck-mounted LF-230 diamond drill capable of advancing the hole to a depth of 2000 meters. Brown Drilling of Kingman, Arizona, the principal drilling contractor on the Kabba project over the past 18 months, will provide support for Major's drilling operation. Brown's local experience in precollar drillhole construction and water well development is expected to continue to benefit the Company's advancement of the Kabba project.

Drillhole K-9 has achieved a total depth to date of 1065 meters. Prior attempts to deepen K-9 have resulted in lost equipment in the hole that prevented the hole from being advanced further. Major Drilling has been charged with diverting K-9 past the lost equipment and completing K-9 to a depth that will assess the potential of the Kabba target. Major will initiate the advancement of K-9 at about 760 meters in strongly sericitized diatreme breccia carrying about five percent disseminated pyrite and weak disseminated sphalerite (zinc sulfide). The drillhole has been in strongly altered diatreme breccia and dacite porphyry of suspected Laramide age after passing out of late Tertiary gravel and volcanic rocks at a depth of 534 meters. A downhole radial IP survey conducted in the drillhole from a depth of about 670 meters showed a strong offhole chargeability feature that is probably part of the same body of pyritic mineralization encountered in the drillhole. The drillhole is testing the hypothetical geometrical center of the decapitated top of the Kabba porphyry system. The geology that has been intersected is consistent with a position near the center of a major magmatic-hydrothermal vent that has been subjected to alteration and mineralization typical of porphyry copper systems. Further drilling is expected to encounter primary copper mineralization underlain by stockwork quartz veinlets identical to those found over 15 square kilometers in the outcropping root zone of the system. The thickness of this interval is estimated to be about 1200 meters, extending below the current bottom of the hole down to the principal fault. The Company plans to continue drilling K-9 to obtain an intersection of the anticipated shell of primary copper mineralization. The company's address is 1780, 400 Burrard St., Vancouver, BC V6C 3A6, 604-669-1484, fax: 604-669-1464, email: [email protected].