As many as 475 Taliban fighters imprisoned at Kandahar central jail, have escaped by breaking the prison in the wee hours of Monday, governor said.
This is the first time that the Taliban fighters use a new tactic, in which insurgents dug a 360-metre long tunnel, paving the ground for the mentioned number of inmates to escape, governor, Toryalai Weesa, said in a news conference here.
The tunnel, starting from a nearby house in Sarpuza area of the provincial capital, led to the cell of political prisoners, he said. “Digging the tunnel is not the work of one week or one month, the Taliban had worked on this for many months,” Weesa said.
Only one of the mentioned inmates was a criminal prisoner and some of them had been arrested back, he said, asking the local people to cooperate with the Afghan government to arrest the rest of the escaped inmates.
Police had been dispatched to the house, from where the tunnel was dug, and bombs and vests ready to be used for suicide attacks were recovered as a result of operation, he said.
Since the inmates were registered by biometric system, it could help in arrest of them, he said.
All 541 Taliban prisoners managed to escape in the 320 metre long tunnel dug by Taliban fighters in the last five months, Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, told Pajhwok Afghan News.
“The tunnel completed last night, from where the imprisoned Taliban fighters were led away by the help of three inmates, who were informed prior to the jailbreaking, which took more than four hours,” the anti-government fighters had said in a statement.
There had been no one in the cell of political prisoners, Ahamdi said.
The escape comes after years of security upgrades and tightened procedures at the 1,200-inmate at Sarpusa Prison following a brazen 2008 Taliban attack that freed 900 prisoners.
A group of suicide attackers, was also prepared before the escape, but since there was no clash between the Taliban fighters and the Afghan and foreign soldiers, the suicide attackers had not been used, the statement of the Taliban fighters, said.
In the 2008 attack, dozens of militants on motorbikes and two suicide bombers assaulted the prison.
One suicide bomber set off an explosives-laden tanker truck at the prison gate while a second bomber blew up an escape route through a back wall.
About 900 inmates escaped, including 400 Taliban fighters.
