PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - Fourteen people were killed on Wednesday when captured fighters of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda seized Pakistani army guards' weapons while being moved to jail by bus and opened fire, government officials said.
The gunbattle in the Kurram tribal agency near the Afghan frontier region of Tora Bora sparked a huge manhunt, the army sealing off the rugged area while helicopters swept overhead seeking escaped prisoners, a senior local official said.
Eight suspected al Qaeda Arabs, five Pakistani soldiers and paramilitary troops and a bus driver were killed in the clash, which broke out as 156 prisoners were being taken to a jail in Kohat by bus from a detention center in Parachinar.
Six Pakistanis were wounded, officials said.
Many of the prisoners tried to escape, said government spokesman Major General Rashid Qureshi. Some had been rounded up and the rest had been surrounded.
A senior official of the North West Frontier Province government said 40 prisoners had escaped and 17 were believed to be still at large. ``The entire area has been cordoned off. We are after them,'' he added.
The prisoners, mainly Arabs who had escaped from eastern Afghanistan in recent weeks, were aboard three buses, one of which overturned during the revolt, Secretary of Information Sayed Anwar Mehmood said. They had not been handcuffed.
The Arabs, many of them Yemenis, had fled a blistering U.S. aerial bombardment of the Tora Bora mountains where Osama bin Laden had been believed to be hiding and were captured by Pakistani border patrols.
The revolt resembled a similar uprising by al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners in Qala-i-Janghi fort in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan last month in which hundreds of the captives were killed after trying to overcome their guards.