Tunnellers spring 475 in Taliban’s great escape

The overnight jailbreak in Afghanistan’s second-largest city underscores the Afghan government’s continuing weakness in the south, despite an influx of international troops, funding and advisers. The 1,200-inmate Sarposa Prison has undergone security upgrades and tightened procedures after a 2008 Taliban attack that freed 900 prisoners.

Afghan government officials and their Nato backers have regularly said the prison has vastly improved security since that attack. But on Sunday night, about 475 prisoners streamed out of the tunnel and disappeared into Kandahar city, prison supervisor Ghulam Dastagir Mayar said.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said insurgents dug the 1,050ft tunnel to the prison over five months, bypassing government checkpoints and major roads. The diggers finally poked through to the prison cells on Sunday night, and the inmates were ushered through the tunnel over four and a half hours by three prisoners who had been informed of the plan, Mr Mujahid said in a statement.

Four of those who escaped were provincial-level Taliban commanders, said Qari Yousef Ahmadi, another Taliban spokesman.

The highest-profile Taliban inmates are not likely to be held at Sarposa. The US keeps detainees it considers a threat at a facility outside Bagram Air Base in eastern Afghanistan. Other key Taliban prisoners are held by the government in a high-security wing of the main prison in Kabul.

Mohammad Abdullah, said to be one of the inmates who helped organise the escape, said a group of inmates obtained copies of the cell keys. “There were four or five of us who knew that our friends were digging a tunnel from the outside,” he said.