General Ghulam Dastgir, who headed the high security Sarposa
jail where almost 500 fighters escaped through a dirt shaft fitted with lights
and air pipes, was led away in handcuffs following a preliminary investigation,
the source said.
Also detained were eight others including Dastgir’s deputy
governor and several senior prison managers, said the source, who spoke on
condition of anonymity.
A spokesman for Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of southern
Kandahar province where the jail was located, confirmed several detentions at
the prison, but declined to name anyone.
“A number of people were detained because they neglected
their duties,” Wesa’s spokesman said.
Several police from stations located around the prison on
the outskirts of Kandahar city had also been dismissed for sleeping when they
should have been on patrol as the mass breakout took place under cover of
darkness, he said.
Afghanistan’s government has launched an investigation into
the escape, the second in three years at the jail, which Karzai’s chief
spokesman said had exposed serious holes in the country’s security
preparedness.
In 2008, around 1,000 prisoners including Taleban fighters
escaped after a truck bomb blew open the jail gates. That mass escape quickly
led to a surge in fighting.
In October 2003, another tunnel dug under the prison complex
also saw 41 insurgents escape from Sarposa, which used to be run by the Taleban
government prior to the US-led invasion of the country in late 2001.
Justice Minister Habibullah Ghaleb, in a letter to President
Hamid Karzai, laid much of the blame for the breakout from Sarposa on failings
by foreign and Afghan security forces, speculating also that it was an inside
job.
International police agency Interpol warned that the failure
by western advisers to properly train Afghan security personnel since 2008 in
recording biometric identifying data for use globally had exposed a flaw in anti-terrorist
cooperation.
“It is simply shocking that three years after the largest
prison break in Afghanistan history, including of convicted terrorists, there
is no data to be shared with law enforcement regionally and globally in the
event of an escape,” said Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble.
Interpol countries had agreed as far back as 2006 to alert
the global law enforcement bodies to prison escapes of suspected militants and
other dangerous criminals, Noble said.
“But with no strong identifying information, such as
photographs, fingerprints or DNA available to law enforcement on the ground,
their efforts are significantly hampered,” he said.
The escape of so many hardened insurgent fighters is a
serious blow so close to the start of the summer fighting months. It also
follows a concerted NATO and Afghan campaign to capture militants over the past
year.
