| Follow-up. |
An investigation has been launched to find out whether any government officials were involved in the commando-style attack by several dozen Taliban fighters.
| Oh, you think ... |
The police chief of Kandahar province, Sayed Agha Saqib, said 390 Taliban prisoners were among the 870 inmates who fled the prison during the attack late Friday.
| I wouldn't be too eager to take those 390 prisoner again ... |
Prison staff said the assault began when a tanker full of explosives was detonated at the Sarposa compound's main entrance, wrecking the gate and a police post and killing the officers inside. A short time later, a suicide bomber travelling on foot blasted a hole in the back of the prison.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said 30 insurgents on motorbikes and two suicide bombers attacked the prison, and claimed militants had been planning the assault for two months. "Today, we succeeded," he said, adding that the escaped prisoners were "going to their homes".
| Funny how we never quite figure out which phone booth Qari is using ... |
Today, security forces were checking vehicles and motorcyclists on key roads in Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city. Some houses were searched where authorities suspected some escapees had hidden, residents said. Nato-led troops were supporting the Afghan security forces in cordoning off the area in the hunt for the prison inmates, said an alliance spokesman in Kabul.
Dozens of police and army soldiers were deployed outside the badly damaged prison. A pile of rubble lay where two towers of the jail had collapsed.
Wali Karzai, the president of Kandahar's provincial council and the brother of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said the prison held about 350 suspected Taliban fighters. "There is no one left," he said.
Dramatic photos show a Marine's narrow escape from death Sunday while facing insurgent gunfire in Afghanistan.
The spring offensive is well launched by NATO. Or, put another way, pre-emptively provoked by the U.S. Marines Expeditionary Force.
Two British servicemen have been killed while patrolling Nato's main airbase in southern Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence said yesterday. The pair, members of the RAF Regiment, died when their vehicle hit a device near Kandahar airfield. Two other British servicemen were wounded in the blast but were said not to have life-threatening injuries. All next of kin have been informed, an MoD spokesman said.
Some of the 3,200 U.S. Marines slated for a seven-month deployment to Afghanistan's volatile south have begun arriving at the region's largest base following a call from Canada for more troops there. About 2,300 troops from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, will be based in Kandahar, the Taliban's former power base. A majority of those Marines arrived in the last several days.
Afghan and NATO-led troops killed a regional Taliban commander and his associate in southern Afghanistan, and an explosion claimed the life a British soldier in a separate incident, officials said Thursday. 
A second NATO soldier was killed on Sunday as Afghan and international troops advanced on the southern town of Musa Qala, which the Taliban has controlled for the last 10 months, defence forces said. Some of the thousands of soldiers involved in the operation launched on Friday had come within two kilometres of the town, progressing through the night and closing in from the north, the Afghan defence force said.