Hundreds of prisoners escaped from a prison in Afghanistan’s south yesterday through a tunnel dug by Taliban insurgents, officials said, a “disaster” for the Afghan government and a setback for foreign forces planning to start a gradual withdrawal within months.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s chief spokesman said the incident, in which many Taliban commanders were said to have escaped, exposed serious vulnerabilities in the Afghan government.
“This is a blow, it is something that should not have happened ... We are looking into finding out ... what exactly happened and what is being done to compensate for the disaster that happened in the prison,” spokesman Waheed Omer told a news conference. “It shows a great vulnerability in the Afghan government.”
Kandahar Province Governor Tooryalai Wesa said 478 prisoners escaped because of the negligence of Afghan security forces at the province’s main jail. He said the start of the tunnel had been traced to a house near the prison.
General Ghulam Dastgir, the governor in charge of the jail, said the prisoners had escaped through the tunnel, which the insurgents had then lined with explosives.
“No one managed to escape through the main gate, everybody went out through the tunnel. The insurgents worked on it for some seven months,” Dastgir said. “The Taliban have planted bombs inside the tunnel and it is hard to investigate until the explosives are removed.”
The prison, touted as one of the most secure in Afghanistan, is on the outskirts of Kandahar City. Analysts said the escape was a serious setback for security and there was doubt about whether the escape could have taken place without the cooperation of prison guards. Some even questioned whether there had been a tunnel at all.
The Taliban said in a statement 541 prisoners escaped through a tunnel that took months to construct and were later moved in vehicles to safer locations.
“Mujahidin started digging a 320m 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 Taliban statement said.
It said the tunnel was completed late on Sunday, with hundreds of insurgents escaping over a four-and-a-half hour period immediately afterwards.
Farid Ahmad Najibi, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry, said an operation had been launched to recapture the prisoners, but that so far only eight had been caught.
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