Signs of inside job in Afghan jailbreak
KABUL—There are signs that a huge Afghan prison break in which hundreds of Taliban inmates escaped through a kilometer-long tunnel was an inside job, the office of President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday.
Separately, international military officials in Afghanistan announced that they had killed a Saudi described as an “Al-Qaeda senior leader” who was their second most-wanted insurgent in the country.
The acknowledgement of possible help in the jailbreak, which follows an initial report from the justice minister, is highly embarrassing for Afghan officials and security forces amid warnings that the mass break-out could hand the Taliban a huge boost.
Around 65 of the nearly 500 prisoners who scrambled out of the prison overnight Sunday have been recaptured, officials said, leaving hundreds more Taliban – including senior figures – on the loose.
It comes at a particularly sensitive time for US-led NATO operations in southern Afghanistan, the country’s main battleground and the Taliban’s heartland, as the annual fighting season gets under way.
“The escape of all inmates through the tunnel is an indicator of cooperation and facilitation from inside the prison,” a statement from the presidential palace said.
Justice Minister Habibullah Ghalib, in an initial report on what happened, told the president that the house where the tunnel started was searched by police two-and-a-half months ago.
The Taliban say the tunnel – whichh is said to have been rigged up with temporary lighting – took five months to dig.
Ghalib also highlighted that transporting the escapees from the house where the tunnel emerged to freedom would have involved a “big convoy”, while digging the hole in the first place would have required a lot of equipment.
The statement said: “All this shouldn’t have remained unnoticed by Afghan and foreign security forces.”
Some 488 prisoners, the vast majority of whom are thought to be Taliban, escaped from the prison in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
The Taliban said this included more than 100 rebel commanders, though Western sources speaking anonymously claimed the figure was significantly lower.
Kandahar provincial authorities said Afghan and NATO troops launched “a huge search operation right after the prisoners escaped” and as a result, 65 of the escapees have now been recaptured.
Some of the recaptured prisoners were brought before journalists at a press conference organized by Afghanistan’s intelligence agency in Kandahar and gave accounts of what happened.
One of them, a Taliban fighter named Wali Mohammad, said he was woken by three Taliban carrying Kalashnikov rifles who took him to the tunnel.
“They guided us to the top of the hole and we all got in, one after another,” he said.
“There were lights inside the tunnel and also a pipe which I think was carrying air. It took us around half an hour to reach the other end.”
Experts have warned that the prison break, the second in Kandahar in three years, could provide a major boost to the Taliban and threaten recent gains claimed by NATO-led forces as the annual fighting season gets going.
As the dust settled on the escape, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) announced they had killed the wanted Saudi Abu Hafs al-Najdi, also known as Abdul Ghani.
He died in an air strike in Kunar province, eastern Afghanistan, on April 13.
ISAF accused him of coordinating “numerous high-profile attacks” and said they had been hunting him for four years.
But spokesman Major Michael Johnson told AFP he could not give details on the attacks for “safety and security reasons” and could not say who was number one on the most-wanted list because of legal issues.
The Saudi interior ministry website lists a man named Saleh Nayef Eid al-Makhlafi, with the nicknames Abu Hafs, Abu Hafs al-Najdi and Abdul Ghani, as one of its 85 most-wanted.
