Taliban free hundreds

Hundreds of prisoners escaped from a jail in Afghanistan's south on Monday through a tunnel dug by Taliban insurgents, officials said, a "disaster" for the Afghan government and a setback for foreign forces planning to start a gradual withdrawal within months. Afghan President Hamid Karzai's chief spokesman told a news conference the incident, in which many Taliban commanders were said to have escaped, exposed serious vulnerabilities in the Afghan government.
"This is a blow, it is something that should not have happened. We are looking into finding out ... what exactly happened and what is being done to compensate for the disaster that happened in the prison," spokesman Waheed Omer said. Tooryalai Wesa, governor of volatile southern Kandahar province, told Reuters 488 prisoners escaped due to the negligence of Afghan security forces at the province's main jail.
He said the tunnel led to a nearby house. General Ghulam Dastgir, the governor in charge of the jail, said the prisoners had all escaped through the tunnel. "No one managed to escape through the main gate, everybody went out through the tunnel. The insurgents worked on it for some seven months," Dastgir said. "The Taliban have planted bombs inside the tunnel and it is hard to investigate until the explosives are removed," he said.
HOLE CUT THROUGH CONCRETE Later on Monday, reporters were taken into the prison to view the opening of the tunnel in one of the cell blocks. Reuters photographs showed a hole, several feet deep, cut into the concrete floor of one of the cells. The hole, big enough to allow one man to climb down at a time, appeared to be connected to a tunnel.
A large carpet in the cell looked to have been folded back to expose the hole. Police told reporters the insurgents had used car jacks to break through the concrete floor, which was several centimetres thick. The Taliban said in a statement 541 prisoners escaped through the tunnel which took months to construct, and were later moved in vehicles to safer locations.
It said the prisoners escaped over a four-and-a-half hour period during the night, meaning more than 100 prisoners an hour would have had to crawl out through a tunnel barely large enough to fit one man. "Mujahideen started digging a 320-metre tunnel to the prison from the south side, which was completed after a five-month period, bypassing enemy checkposts and the Kandahar-Kabul main highway leading directly to the political prison," the Taliban statement said.
"They moved people in several groups. They had a comfortable period of time to move that many people. It's obviously very worrying with the timing around fighting season," said a foreign official in Kandahar with knowledge of the incident. Wesa said of the 488 who had escaped, 13 were ordinary criminals and the rest were insurgents. Only 26 prisoners had so far been recaptured and two had been killed in a gunfight with security forces, he said.
COLLABORATION? The prison, touted as one of the most secure in Afghanistan, is on the outskirts of Kandahar city. Analysts said the escape was a serious setback for security, and there was doubt about whether it could have happened without the help of guards.
"It is either a case of the jailers being financially motivated and being bribed, or a case of them being politically motivated," said Waheed Mujhda, a Kabul-based analyst and expert on the Taliban. Justice Ministry spokesman Farid Ahmad Najibi said he could not rule out the possibility guards had helped in the escape.
Whether the insurgents had all escaped through the tunnel or not, the freeing of hundreds of prisoners, including Taliban militants, is embarrassing for the Afghan government and foreign troops who have trumpeted recent security gains in and around Kandahar after months of heavy fighting, Mujhda said. Kandahar has been the focus of the US-led military campaign over the past year, with tens of thousands of US and Afghan troops launching offensives around Kandahar city.