Kandahar, April 26: Two prison escapees have been shot dead while 26 others have been recaptured after hundreds of militants escaped from a jail overnight in troubled southern Afghanistan.
Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar Province says security forces will continue the operation to recapture other inmates who broke out of Kandahar prison, a Media correspondent reported.
Nearly 500 inmates escaped through a 360-meter-long tunnel, which militants had dug from the outside.
Reports say the escaped inmates are all Taliban militants, who represented over one-third of the prison’s total population.
There were over a hundred Taliban commanders among the escapees.
This is the second major escape in Kandahar in three years. In 2008, around 1,000 prisoners escaped after the Taliban used a truck bomb to blow open the jail’s gates.
The deadly incidents come as Taliban militants are believed to have been making inroads in different parts of Afghanistan.
The surge in violence comes despite the presence of 150,000 foreign troops in the country.
The US-led invasion took place in 2001 with the official objective of curbing militancy and bringing peace and stability to the war-ravaged country.
Anti-war groups have highlighted the fact that Afghanistan still remains unstable ten years after the invasion.
——–Agencies