Post by Denisa on Jun 14, 2008 12:00:11 GMT -5
Around 400 Taliban escape in attack on Afghan prison (Roundup)
Kandahar - Around 400 imprisoned Taliban were freed in a an insurgent attack on a prison in southern Afghanistan, which left more than a dozen dead, lawmakers and escaped prisoners said Saturday.
The multi-pronged, commando-style attack, carried out by suicide bombers and other militants using small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades, broke open the entrance to Kandahar's main provincial jail late Friday.
'Some 390 jailed Taliban militants have all escaped from the prison,' Ahmad Wali Karzai, younger brother of President Hamid Karzai and the head of the provincial council of Kandahar told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
'It was a planned attack that succeeded. They had suicide bombers and other fighters,' Karzai said, adding that the militants had been in telephone contact with prison inmates days before the attack occurred.
Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousif Ahmadi warned that their fighters were able to carry out such attacks in other parts of the country, sparking concern that Taliban had gained unprecedented clout to jeopardize the western-backed Afghan government.
'We detonated a truck loaded with 1,800 kilogrammes of explosives and broke the gate and killed all the guards,' Ahmadi told dpa by telephone from an undisclosed location.
More than 400 jailed Taliban including some arrested rebel leaders had escaped, he added.
'We were all taken out in cars by Taliban,' Abdullah Jan, an escaped Taliban prisoner told dpa by phone from a secret location,' adding, 'The Taliban broke the gate and took us out. Some 460 political prisoners were in this prison and all of us escaped.'
Another escaped prisoner, who requested anonymity said, 'Actually we did not know what was happening, it was night around 10:00 pm when they attacked the prison.'
'They came and broke the doors of our cells and took us to other places,' he said.
Meanwhile, life returned to normal in Kandahar city, once the main stronghold of Taliban fugitive leader Mullah Omar, with a heavy troop and police forces presence on the streets.
The area around the prison was cordoned off by Afghan security forces and journalists were not allowed to approach the site.
Afghan forces also mounted a massive hunt soon after the prison- escape to capture hundreds of prisoners.
'Most of the Taliban have reached areas under control of Taliban, so it will be difficult or impossible for police to recapture them,' a police official, who was patrolling in the area, said, but declined to be named.
'If we reach there, we could not only arrest the prisoners, but also the Taliban who are practically fighting us, but the problem is they are out of our hands,' the official said.
Mohammad Qasim Hashimzai, the Deputy Minister of Justice in Kabul, confirmed that more than 1,000 prisoners were in the Kandahar city jail at the time of attack and 'most of them have escaped.'
A large number of Afghan and foreign forces have launched a search operation to track down the fleeing prisoners, he said.
'Only around 200 prisoners have remained in the prison, the rest all of them have escaped. All this happened in 15 to 20 minutes,' Karzai said.
Nine police, seven inmates and a civilian were killed during the firefight and explosions in one of the largest prisons in the country, he added.
Another police official, who requested anonymity, said more than a dozen policemen guarding the prison had died in the attack.
The prison, which housed around 1,200 inmates including several hundred Taliban members, is located in the western outskirts of Kandahar city,
Hundreds of prisoners, mainly Taliban members, went on hunger strike in May, demanding fair trials and complaining of being tortured by prison authorities.
At least 47 jailed Taliban members stitched their lips shut during the several-day-long strike that ended when parliamentarians from Kabul intervened.
Thousands of Taliban militants, who lost power in late 2001 in the US-led military invasion, and their al-Qaeda associates have been arrested by Afghan and international forces during the past six years.
Several inmates and security personnel were wounded when a group of Taliban prisoners revolted in Pul-e-Charkhi prison in Kabul in 2006. The group took control of a block in the prison before security forces recaptured them in an armed encounter.
In summer 2005, four foreign members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network escaped from a high-security US-controlled prison in Bagram airfield, the main US military base in the northern part of the capital Kabul.
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