Hundreds escape in Taliban assault on prison

More than 600 prisoners escaped during a brazen Taliban bomb and rocket attack on the main prison in southern Afghanistan that knocked down the front gate and demolished a prison floor, officials said today.

At least nine police were killed.

The complex attack late Friday included a truck bombing at the main gate, a suicide bomber who struck a back wall and rockets fired from inside the prison courtyard, setting off a series of explosions that rattled Kandahar, the country’s second biggest city.

A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said 30 insurgents on motorbikes and two suicide bombers attacked Sarposa Prison and freed about 400 Taliban members.

One of the militants who escaped, Abdul Nafai, said the insurgents had minibuses waiting outside the prison during the attack and that dozens of militants fled the scene in the vehicles.

Police official Mohammad Jamal Khan said more than 600 prisoners escaped. He said nine police were killed and 12 wounded. Eight prisoners also died in the assault, he said. More than 30 nearby shops were damaged.

Mohammad Qasim Hashimzai, a deputy minister at the Justice Ministry, said the Kandahar prison housed nearly 1,000 prisoners and more than half escaped. He said officials couldn’t yet offer a precise figure.

Hashimzai said there was no advance intelligence to indicate a large-scale attack was imminent, but he said as a precaution the prison’s chief official, Abdul Qabir, was under investigation for possible involvement.

Wali Karzai, the president of Kandahar’s provincial council and the brother of President Hamid Karzai, earlier said the prison held about 350 suspected Taliban fighters. He said all the prisoners escaped, but had no specific number. “There is no one left,” he said.

Hashimzai said the jail did not meet international minimum standards for a prison. The Kandahar facility was not built as a prison but had been modified into one, he said.

A delegation of deputy ministers from the Justice and Interior Ministries left for Kandahar early today.

“Plans are under way to renovate all the prisons around the country,” said Hashimzai. “Kandahar was one of them, but unfortunately what happened last night is cause for concern.”

Kandahar was the Taliban’s former stronghold and its province has been the scene of fierce fighting the past two years between insurgents and Nato troops, primarily from Canada and the US.

Qabir, the chief of Kandahar’s Sarposa Prison, said the assault began when a tanker truck full of explosives detonated at the prison’s main entrance, wrecking the gate and a police post, killing all the officers inside.

Soon after, a suicide bomber on foot blasted a hole in the back of the prison, Qabir said.

A shopkeeper who sells vegetables near the prison, Mohammad Hiqmatullah, said he saw prisoners run out and disappear into nearby pomegranate and grape groves.

Ahmadi, the Taliban spokesman, said militants had been planning the assault for two months. “Today we succeeded,” he said, adding the escaped prisoners were “going to their homes”.

Soldiers with Nato’s International Security Assistance Force helped provide a security cordon after the attack.

Last month, some 200 Taliban suspects at the prison ended a week-long hunger strike after a parliamentary delegation promised that their cases would be reviewed.