Insurgents tunnel into Afghan jail, hundreds of prisoners freed

KANDAHAR, Apr 25 (agencies): Insurgents freed hundreds of prisoners, including Taliban commanders, after tunneling into an Afghan jail Monday, officials said, in a serious security setback ahead of the planned start of foreign troop withdrawals. Afghan President Hamid Karzai's chief spokesman called the incident a disaster that exposed serious vulnerabilities in the Afghan government. Tooryalai Wesa, governor of the volatile southern Kandahar province, told Reuters 478 prisoners escaped due to the negligence of Afghan security forces at the province's main jail. He said the start of the tunnel had been traced to a house near the prison. General Ghulam Dastgir, the governor in charge of the prison, told Reuters all the prisoners had escaped through the tunnel, which the insurgents had then lined with explosives. "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 added. 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 the escape could have taken place without the connivance of prison guards, and even whether there had been a tunnel at all. The Taliban said in a statement 541 prisoners escaped through a tunnel which took months to construct, and were later moved in vehicles to safer locations. "Mujahideen started digging a 320-meter 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. It said the tunnel was completed late Sunday, with hundreds of insurgents escaping over a four-and-a-half hour period immediately afterwards. Around 500 Taliban prisoners escaped in an audacious jailbreak in southern Afghanistan overnight after their comrades freed them using a massive underground tunnel, officials said Monday. The Taliban said it was behind the operation in Kandahar, the militant Islamist outfit's heartland, and claimed that all of those who escaped were its members, many of them senior commanders. The daring breakout threatens to undermine recent security gains claimed by foreign forces following a US troop surge in the area, with the newly-freed insurgents once again available to wreak havoc.