WASHINGTON, Feb 8: Senate Democrats on Tuesday lambasted the Bush administration’s ‘totally inadequate’ response to the escape in Yemen this week of 23 Al Qaeda members.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that the prison break — which included a man convicted in the deadly bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 — was a ‘disappointing development’.

Democratic Senators Chuck Levin and Charles Schumer said a much more forceful administration response is called for.

“We’re dismayed by the administration’s tepid response,” Mr Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at a press conference. “It’s not disappointing. It’s down-right appalling that this escape happened,” said Mr Levin as he called on the Bush administration to press Yemen for answers.

“How did this kind of a massive digging operation go undetected? Who were the outside accomplices?” Mr Levin said, while raising questions of whether the Yemeni government or intelligence service was complicit in the breakout.

He added that Washington must offer US assistance to help Yemen’s government recapture the escapees.

Schumer, who announced that he was sending a letter to the president requesting safeguards to prevent similar mishaps in the future, said the escapes undo years of anti-terror efforts.

“I want to see Al Qaeda prisoners, wherever they are, held securely,” he said.—AFP