Monday, April 25, 2011

Uh Oh...

Somebody has some explaining to do.
Taliban militants tunnelled more than 480 inmates out the main prison in southern Afghanistan overnight, whisking them through a 320-metre-long underground passage they had dug over months, officials and insurgents said Monday.
Saraposa prison officials in the city of Kandahar only discovered the breach about 4 a.m. local time, about a half-hour after the Taliban said they had gotten all the prisoners out.
The militants began digging the tunnel about five months ago from a house within shooting distance of the prison guard towers. It was not immediately clear whether they lived in the house while they dug.
They meticulously plotted the tunnel's course around police checkpoints and major roads, the insurgent group said in a brazen statement.
The diggers finally broke through to the prison cells around 11 p.m. Sunday night, and a handful of inmates who knew of the plan unlocked cells and ushered hundreds of inmates to freedom without a shot being fired.

Inmates had keys

A man who claimed he helped organize those inside the prison told The Associated Press in a phone call that he and his accomplices obtained copies of the keys for the cells ahead of time from "friends." He did not say who those friends were, but his comments suggested possible collusion by prison guards.
"There were four or five of us who knew that our friends were digging a tunnel from the outside," said Mohammad Abdullah, who said he had been in Sarposa prison for two years after being captured in nearby Zhari district with a stockpile of weapons...
Ballsy. There's a seat beside Harry for this one.

Oh yeah, go team Canada:

Canadian correctional services officers had spent years training guards at the prison. 

On a more serious note, if the Taleban were able to pull this off under NATO's nose, what else have they got going?

4 comments:

The Conscientist said...

A quote I heard years ago reported from an Afghani "You westerners have all the watches, we have all the time".

In 2014 or 2045 or something we will pull our pasty asses out of Afghanistan just like everyone from Alexander to the Soviet Union has since forever.

Trout said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Trout said...

Crap. My computer was logged into somebody elses account. Don't take the The Conscientist comment from them, it wasn't theirs

croghan27 said...

....and the last I heard they, in good capitalist style, smuggled the sand out and sold the sand from the tunnels in the local marketplace.