Hundreds freed in Afghan Taliban jailbreak
In a serious setback for security in Afghanistan, hundreds of prisoners have escaped from a prison in the southern Kandahar province through a tunnel dug by Taliban insurgents.
The governor of Kandahar province said 478 detainees had escaped from the Sarposa jail as a result of the negligence of Afghan security forces.
The tunnel is thought to have been dug from a rented house to the south of the prison.
A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the incident, in which many Taliban commanders are said to have been freed, exposed serious vulnerabilities in the Afghan government.
General Ghulam Dastgir, the prison’s governor, explained that the prisoners had escaped through a tunnel, which insurgents had then lined with explosives.
“The Taliban have planted bombs inside the tunnel and it is hard to investigate until the explosives are removed,” he said.
A Taliban statement said the tunnel had taken months to construct and that escapees had subsequently been moved to safer locations.
“Mujahadeen started digging a 320-metre tunnel to the prison from the south side, which was completed after a five-month period, bypassing enemy checkposts and the Kandahar-Kabul main highway leading directly to the political prison,” the statement said.
A spokesman for Afghanistan’s Justice Ministry, Farid Ahmad Najibi, said he could not rule out the possibility that guards in charge of the prison were complicit in the escape.
The jailbreak comes months before the start of a transfer of security responsibilities from foreign to Afghan forces in several areas, as part of the eventual withdrawal of US troops from the country.
In 2008 the Taliban blew open the gate of the same prison during the night, allowing up to 1,000 inmates, including hundreds of Taliban insurgents, to escape.