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Afghan and international troops launched a desperate hunt Saturday for more than 1,100 prisoners NATO said escaped a jail in Afghanistan when Taliban rebels blasted it open, killing prison guards.
The Taliban said 400 of its own fighters escaped when the rebels attacked the facility in the southern city of Kandahar late 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 rebels 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 underway to find the escaped inmates. The Afghan security forces are searching for them within the city and along the main and secondary roads," Hashimzai told AFP in the capital, Kabul. 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 the 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 rebels used suicide bombs and detonated a bomb-laden water tanker in the attack.
"First we exploded two suicide attacks and then our mujahedeen (holy warriors) riding motorcycles entered the prison and killed the remaining security guards.
"We successfully freed all prisoners, including our jailed Taliban and other prisoners," he told AFP.
A statement posted on the Taliban website, signed by Ahmadi, said the rebels 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 rebels declared at the beginning of this year.
An AFP reporter based in the southern city said large numbers of security forces including those of the US-trained Afghan national army had been deployed 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 prison's 1,052 inmates had not escaped.
The prison raid is a blow to President Hamid Karzai, coming one day after world donors pledged 20 billion dollars to rebuild Afghanistan at a conference in Paris but also called on him to strengthen the rule of law.
Despite the presence of about 70,000 international troops mainly operating under NATO, the insurgency 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 southwestern 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 American.
Two British soldiers and a Romanian trooper -- all serving with the separate NATO-led force -- were killed in two separate attacks in Afghanistan on Thursday and Friday.
The Taliban have been battling Hamid Karzai's 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.
PHOTO CAPTION:
A jail in Kandahar
AFP
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