Elizabeth Palmer Heads to Timbuktu on Tonight's CBS EVENING NEWS

CBS News Correspondent Elizabeth Palmer speaks with a resident of Timbuktu, Mali, who saved thousands of priceless Arabic artifacts. The report will be broadcast tonight, Feb. 5 on the CBS EVENING NEWS WITH SCOTT PELLEY (6:30-7:00 PM, ET) on the CBS Television Network.

When Islamic extremists drove into Mali's fabled town of Timbuktu last April, resident Abdul Kader Haidara initiated an emergency plan to preserve the manuscripts from one of the world's greatest historical legacies from the extremists' grasps.

"I bought every tin box I could find, the kind we store household goods in, and I filled them with manuscripts until the library was empty," Haidara tells Palmer.
Haidara says that he quietly distributed the full boxes to local families so that they could hide them.

Patricia Shevlin is the Executive Producer of the CBS EVENING NEWS WITH SCOTT PELLEY.