TIKRIT: Iraqi authorities launched a manhunt on Thursday after an apparent inside job saw 16 Al-Qaeda members, including five who had been sentenced to death, escape from prison overnight.

The group escaped through a window and scaled a ladder to climb over the prison wall in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, just hours after being transferred to the jail.

“Major security measures have been taken by central and provincial authorities,” Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdel Karim Khalaf told AFP. “Search units have been deployed and we have reinforced the border (with Syria),” he added. One of the fugitives was recaptured on Thursday morning but the others are still at large, a security official said.

Moamer Abdel Salam Mehdi, originally imprisoned for the murder of several policemen, was detained 15 km south of Tikrit in the town of Owaynat.

The prisoners had been transferred to the jail, which is run by the Interior Ministry, earlier on Wednesday evening, a police source said.

Iraq’s prison system divides responsibility between the ministries of justice, interior and defense, with various detention facilities run by each of the three. A senior official in Salaheddin province’s security operations command told AFP that the escapees had probably received assistance from officials within the province’s prison system. “It is clear there was cooperation with specific groups that helped them escape. Probably one of the officials helped them,” said the official, who declined to be named.

In the aftermath of the escape, the head of the province’s police anti-terror forces, Col. Mohammed Salah Al-Juburi, was fired by the provincial police chief, a police source said.

Khalaf added that several provincial security officers responsible for prisoner surveillance were arrested in connection with the escape, but he declined to specify how many.

The province’s governor, police chief and other senior security officials held an urgent meeting on Thursday morning over the prison escape. Tikrit was the hometown of Saddam Hussein and many of his henchmen.

US commanders say that Al-Qaeda remains a threat in Iraq but insist that its attempts to establish a caliphate in the war-torn country have failed.

In neighboring Kirkuk province, Iraqi and American security forces arrested a senior leader of a group loyal to Saddam, the Army of the Followers of the Naqshbandiya Order, or JRTN from its Arabic acronym.

Salaheddin Abdul Wahhab Othman, a former air force general under Saddam, was detained in connection with supplying financial aid to “terrorist groups” and “for coordinating and organizing multiple terrorist cells in Salaheddin province and northern Iraq,” a US military statement said.