Great Escape: Taliban Carry Out Massive Prison Breakout

In a scene straight out of the movie The Great Escape, Taliban thugs tunneled hundreds of feet into a prison compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan and hundreds of prisoners were able to escape.

Officials at Sarposa prison in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, say they only discovered the breach at about 4 a.m., 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 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.

Later on Monday, reporters were taken into the prison to view the opening of the tunnel in one of the cell blocks.

Reuters photographs showed a hole, several feet deep, cut into the concrete floor of one of the cells. The hole, big enough to allow one man to climb down at a time, appeared to be connected to a tunnel.

To say that this was a huge failure of Afghan security at the prison complex is an understatement. It would further appear that members of the Afghan security at the prison looked the other way as the prisoners were able to escape from the compound as the Taliban claimed that they had obtained keys to prison gates from "friends".