BAGHDAD: Militants stormed two Iraqi prisons including notorious Abu Ghraib with mortar rounds, bombs and gunfire, freeing at least 500 inmates in assaults that cost more than 40 lives, officials said on Monday.

The coordinated attacks on Taji prison, north of Baghdad, and Abu Ghraib, west of the capital, were launched on Sunday night and triggered fighting which raged for around 10 hours, officials said.

Abu Ghraib prison, infamous as a center for the torture of opponents of now-executed dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, gained further notoriety in 2004 when graphic pictures emerged showing prisoners being humiliated and abused by their US guards.

“About 500 prisoners escaped from Abu Ghraib prison,” Hakem Al-Zamili, a member of the parliamentary security and defense committee, told AFP.

Zamili said that, to his knowledge, no inmates escaped from the prison in Taji.

But MP Shwan Taha, also a security and defense committee member, said in an online statement that between 500 and 1,000 inmates escaped from the two prisons.

A frenzy of comments posted on social media, including some Twitter accounts apparently operated by jihadis, claimed that thousands of prisoners had escaped.

Officials said at least 20 members of the security forces were killed and 40 wounded in the attacks. And the Justice Ministry’s spokesman said 21 inmates were killed and 25 wounded in rioting at the prisons.

It was not immediately clear how many of the militants who attacked the prison were killed, wounded or captured.

The attacks were launched at around 9:30 p.m. (1830 GMT) on Sunday when the militants fired mortar rounds at the prisons.

Four car bombs were detonated near the entrances to the prisons, while three suicide bombers attacked the Taji prison, a police colonel said. Five roadside bombs also exploded near the prison in Taji.

Fighting continued throughout the night as the military deployed aircraft and sent in reinforcements around the two facilities.

The situation was eventually brought under control on Monday morning, according to the colonel.

But the Interior Ministry issued a statement before midnight on Sunday saying the attack had already been foiled.