KABUL: Twelve Afghan Taliban escaped from the 1,200-inmate Kandahar Prison after a jail employee falsely put their names on a list of detainees who were scheduled for release, a spokesman for Kandahar’s police chief said on Sunday.

The men walked out of the prison and the jail employee disappeared, Zia Durrani said. Two of the 12 were later recaptured, he added.

The chief of security for Kandahar, Rahmatullah Atrafi, said a letter had been sent to the prison on Tuesday requesting a prisoner release. Eighteen inmates on the list were due to be freed, but the other 12 were not.

The Taliban say they carried out the deception, which was only discovered after the inmates were freed.

Kandahar Prison has seen spectacular escapes in the past. In 2011, more than 450 prisoners, many of them Taliban fighters, tunnelled their way out of the prison and fled in buses that had been dispatched to collect them.

Southern Afghanistan has been the site of some of the heaviest fighting in the protracted Afghan conflict as Afghan and international combat troops have tried to root out a stubborn insurgency.

But the Taliban have been tenacious and most Afghans say the Taliban still rule in much of the countryside.

Meanwhile, a car bomb exploded prematurely overnight in eastern Afghanistan, killing nine militants and four civilians, authorities said.

The blast happened in Logar province, some 10km north of the capital, Pul-i-Alam, said Din Mohammad Darwesh, a spokesman for the provincial governor. Darwesh said it appeared the militants, who he identified as three Afghans and six Pakistanis, set off the bomb too early.

“Unfortunately, the explosion completely destroyed a nearby civilian house in which two women and two children were killed,” he said in a telephone interview. “Police and local residents retrieved the bodies.”

Two days earlier, additional Afghan soldiers were deployed in the capital after receiving an intelligence report about a possible attack. Also on Sunday, a lone suicide bomber entered a police station in Kandahar province, though officers’ fire forced him to detonate his explosive vest early, only wounding one civilian.—Agencies