MAZAR-i-SHARIF, Dec 1: An extraordinary twist to the bloody battle of the Qala-i-Jangi emerged on Friday with the revelation that at least one of the Taliban prisoners there was still alive, living on horse meat in an underground complex. All the Taliban had been hitherto assumed dead.

Five unarmed Afghan Red Cross workers who ventured into a basement where a small group of Taliban fighters had hidden retreated in panic when a prisoner - or prisoners - fired three shots at them in the dark along a corridor. One worker was hit in the arm and another in the leg.

On Wednesday, at least two surviving Pakistani Taliban were heard in this part of the complex talking in Urdu. These men - thought to be the last survivors of the original contingent - wounded a soldier who tried to explore their lair.

But a military commander then fired nine big rockets into the bunker under a classroom building in the compound, which lies outside Mazar-i-Sharif. The soldiers who had been guarding all escape routes from the basement in the middle of the tree-filled compound went home, assuming the prisoners were dead.

At midday on Thursday, nearly 24 hours later, the Afghan Red Cross workers wandered down into the complex to bring out the foreign fighters’ bodies.

“It was dark and we could not see them,” said Mohammed Karim, who was being treated later for his wounds in a military hospital in Mazar-i-Sharif. “We had gone down about 20 or 30 steps when someone started shooting at us. I was shot in the arm. We hid in a corner of a wall and then we ran away.”

Mr Karim said he saw only one body lying next to the door, that of a dead soldier from the anti-Taliban militia of Uzbeks under General Rashid Dostam.

“There was a faint smell of gunpowder in the air but nothing else. Only one of us was carrying a torch. We simply went down there and they fired on us,” he said.

Before retreating to the basement the Taliban prisoners shot dead a horse from the stable area. They have apparently been eating it since.

The survivors almost certainly have no water and are unlikely to be able to tell if it is day or night. They have been asked to surrender, but have refused.

“We find it extraordinary that this incident occurred exactly four days and four nights after the fighting broke out (on Sunday),” Simon Brooks, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in northern Afghanistan, said. “It was no longer a safe environment for us and we left.”

The shooting by one or more Taliban who still have at least one loaded Kalshnikov prompted a small group of British SAS soldiers and one US special forces officer to rush back to the mud-walled fort.

They spent Thursday afternoon coordinating a new attempt to kill any survivors with yet more rockets.

The special forces have been intimately involved in the operation to wipe out Taliban resistance at the fort. They called in air strikes to pummel the prisoners.

On Friday night, troops were guarding the pink classroom building again.

During the day the Red Cross collected around 50 more Taliban bodies, bringing the tally of dead foreign fighters recovered from the scene to around 170.

While more bodies may still be found, the total looks likely to be fewer than the 300-400 prisoners who arrived at the fort last Saturday, suggesting some escaped during the fighting. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.