Insurgents freed hundreds of prisoners, including Taliban commanders, after tunnelling into an Afghan jail today, officials said, in a serious security setback ahead of the planned start of foreign troop withdrawals.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai's chief spokesman called the incident a disaster that 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," Waheed Omer told a news conference.
"It shows a great vulnerability in the Afghan government."
Tooryalai Wesa, governor of the volatile southern Kandahar province, told Reuters 488 prisoners escaped due to 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 prison, said all 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," General Dastgir said.
"The Taliban have planted bombs inside the tunnel and it is hard to investigate until the explosives are removed," he added.
Reporters were taken into the prison to view the opening of the tunnel in one of the cell blocks. Photographs showed a hole, several feet deep, cut into the concrete floor of one of the cells. The hole, big enough to allow one man to climb down at a time, appeared to be connected to a tunnel.
A large carpet in the cell looked to have been folded back to expose the hole. Police told reporters the insurgents had used car jacks to break through the concrete floor, which was several centimetres thick.
The Taliban said in a statement 541 prisoners escaped through the tunnel which took months to construct, and were later moved in vehicles to safer locations.
It said the prisoners escaped over a four-and-a-half hour period during the night, meaning more than 100 prisoners an hour would have had to crawl out through a tunnel barely large enough to fit one man.
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 connivance of prison guards, and even whether there had been a tunnel at all.
The Taliban said in a statement 541 prisoners escaped through a tunnel which took months to construct, and were later moved in vehicles to safer locations.
"Mujahideen 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 Taliban statement said.
It said the tunnel was completed late last night, with hundreds of insurgents escaping over a four-and-a-half hour period immediately afterwards.
Agencies