KABUL, June 14: Afghan and international troops launched a desperate hunt on Saturday for more than 1,100 prisoners Nato said escaped a jail in Afghanistan when the Taliban blasted it open, killing prison guards.
The Taliban said 400 of its own fighters escaped when their men attacked the facility in the Kandahar city late on Friday, blasting it open with suicide bombs before shooting the guards.
Afghan authorities put the number of prisoners who fled one of the country’s biggest jails at 886, more than 380 of whom were Taliban.
The Taliban said they spent two months planning the attack, which deputy justice minister Mohammad Qasim Hashimzai said was their most sophisticated yet, and which came as four troops with the US-led forces were killed in the south.
“A massive operation is under way to find the escaped inmates. The Afghan security forces are searching for them within the city and along the main and secondary roads,” Hashimzai said. None of the escaped inmates has yet been caught, he added.
“Afghanistan national security forces and Isaf forces have cordoned off the area to re-establish security and recapture the escapees,” General Carlos Branco, a spokesman for Nato’s International Security Assistance Force told AFP. “More than 1,100 prisoners were able to escape.”
A Taliban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, calling AFP from an unknown location, said the militants used suicide bombs and detonated a bomb-laden water tanker in the attack.
“First we carried out two suicide attacks and then our Mujahideen riding motorcycles entered the prison and killed the remaining security guards.
“We successfully freed all prisoners, including our jailed Taliban and other prisoners,” he said.
A statement posted on the Taliban website, signed by Ahmadi, said the Mujahideen had planned the attack two months ago.
“Today we succeeded,” it said, adding the raid was part of a militant operation — Ibrat, which means Lesson — which the Taliban declared at the beginning of this year.
Large numbers of security forces, including those of the US-trained Afghan national army, were deployed in Kandahar to search vehicles.
It was not clear how many prison guards were killed in the raid, with Hashimzai saying seven had died and Ahmad Wali Karzai, the head of the Kandahar Provincial Council, putting the figure at 15.
Hashimzai said just 173 of the inmates had not escaped.
The prison raid is a blow to President Hamid Karzai, coming one day after world donors pledged $20 billion to rebuild Afghanistan at a conference in Paris but also called on him to fight corruption and strengthen the rule of law.
Despite the presence of about 70,000 international troops, mainly operating under Nato, the Taliban resistance aimed at toppling the US-backed government in Kabul has gained pace in the past two years.
On Saturday, a roadside bomb killed four soldiers with the US-led coalition forces in the Farah province, taking the number of foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year to 83.Another soldier was seriously injured, the coalition said in a statement.
Their nationalities were not revealed but most soldiers in the coalition are Americans.
The Taliban have been battling the Karzai government since they were toppled from power in a US-led operation for failing to hand over Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in 2001.
