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Gov't investigate Taliban jailbreak

Published:Wednesday | April 27, 2011 | 12:00 AM
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An Afghan policeman checks a car as his colleagues (centre) talks with the driver at a checkpoint searching for the missing Taliban insurgents in Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan. - AP photos
Afghan soldiers check a military ambulance, before it enters the defence ministry in Kabul, Afghanistan, on April 18. An alleged Taliban sleeper agent opened fire Monday in the third deadly breach of security in Afghanistan in less than a week.
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KANDAHAR (AP):

The massive security breach that allowed the Taliban to spirit more than 480 Afghan inmates out southern Afghanistan's largest prison must have involved inside collaborators, the justice ministry said yesterday, as security forces worked to recapture the escaped convicts.

Prison officials discovered early Monday morning that the inmates, nearly all of them Taliban militants, were missing from their cells, and then found the tunnel through which they appeared to have made their getaway.

The Taliban said the prison break was five months in the making, with diggers starting the tunnel from under a nearby house while they arranged for inmates to get keys so that they could open their cells on the night of the escape.

Government officials started to piece through the details of the escape yesterday and place blame. Justice Minister Habibullah Ghalib sent a formal letter to President Hamid Karzai acknowledging that prison officials or guards likely acted as accomplices but also saying that Afghan and international security forces should have detected the plot.