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Afghan prison escape: Manhunt for Taliban fighters

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Afghan prison escape: Manhunt for Taliban fighters

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Afghan prison escape: Manhunt for Taliban fighters
By Angus McDowall and Telegraph reporters
Last Updated: 5:46PM BST 14/06/2008

A massive manhunt has been launched in southern Afghanistan to track down hundreds of Taliban militants who were dramatically rescued from a top security prison.

A Nato spokesman said this morning that as many as 1,100 detainees had escaped after the Taliban attacked Sarposa Prison in Kandahar using suicide bombers, a truck bomb and rockets, killing at least nine security guards.

"A massive operation is under way to find the escaped inmates," said Afghanistan's deputy justice minister Qasim Hashimzai.

"The Afghan security forces are searching for them within the city and along the main and secondary roads."

The attackers struck with a bomb concealed in a water tanker that blew apart the prison gates, allowing a suicide bomber to dash inside and destroy two mud walls crushing police officers and guards.

At the same time, Taliban fighters on motorbike fired rockets at the complex in what an Afghan minister described as the rebels' "most sophisticated attack yet."

In a sign of the Taliban's confidence in the success of their attack, minibuses were waiting nearby to ferry the rescued prisoners to freedom. Others scurried away through the undergrowth.

"Afghanistan national security forces and ISAF forces have cordoned off the area to re-establish security and recapture the escapees," said General Carlos Branco, a spokesman for the Nato's International Security Assistance Force.

Qari Yousef Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman, said hundreds of prisoners had escaped in the assault, which he said had been planned for the past two months "to release our Taliban friends".

"Today we succeeded," he said. The escaped prisoners "are safe in town and they are going to their homes."

He said 30 insurgents on motorbikes and two suicide bombers staged the attack. He added that a handful of prisoners had not seized the chance to escape and had remained in the prison.

But Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai and the president of Kandahar's provincial council, said: "All the prisoners escaped. There is no one left."

Sarwar Danish, the justice minister, said: "A big part of the front wall of the prison has collapsed. Two prison guards have been martyred, an unknown number are wounded and there might be some prison guards under the rubble which I don't have a figure for."

The multi-pronged attack began about 9.30pm and lasted at least half an hour, with small arms fire being exchanged between militants and soldiers who raced to the scene.

Mohammad Hiqmatullah, a shopkeeper who sells vegetables near the prison, said he saw prisoners escape after the attack and run toward pomegranate and grape groves that lie behind the prison. Mr Karzai said the fields offered good cover for the escapees.

The jail held common criminals as well as Taliban militants who are fighting Nato forces, including British soldiers, and the Afghan government.

Kandahar, the Taliban's former stronghold and Afghanistan's second-largest city, has been the scene of fierce battles between Taliban fighters and Nato's International Security Assistance Force troops, primarily from Canada and the United States. The ISAF said it was aware of the attack but had few details.

Last month, around 200 Taliban suspects at the jail ended a week-long hunger strike after a parliamentary delegation promised their cases would be reviewed.

Habibullah Jan, an Afghan politician, said some of the hunger strikers had been held without trial for more than two years. Others were given lengthy prison sentences after short trials.

Mr Jan said 47 of the prisoners had stitched their mouths shut during the hunger strike in May.

Although the Afghan government said it had no evidence of plans for a new Taliban assault, four soldiers from the US-led force were today killed in a bomb attack.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... hters.html
[i]‘We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat’ - Queen Victoria, 1899[/i]
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