Almost 400 prisoners have escaped from a prison in Pakistan after it was attacked by militants, officials say.<\/p>\n
At least 100 Islamist militants launched the assault on the jail in north-west Pakistan at 01:00 (20:00 GMT Saturday).<\/p>\n
Officials said some of the freed men were “dangerous” insurgents, including an inmate on death row for trying to kill ex-President Pervez Musharraf.<\/p>\n
The jail is located in Bannu, a town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which borders Pakistan’s volatile tribal areas.<\/p>\n
On several occasions over the last year, the Pakistani Taliban have employed a similar tactic of using a large number of militants to attack a single site at the dead of night.<\/p>\n
In the past it has been military outposts close to the Afghan border that were the target; this time it was even more audacious.<\/p>\n
Police say the attackers went straight to the wing of the prison that housed death row inmates, including Adnan Rashid. He was a comparative rarity in Pakistan: a man convicted for his part in a militant plot.<\/p>\n
Those responsible for years of attacks in Pakistan are seldom brought to book, and security failings are rarely fully acknowledged.<\/p>\n
That is likely to be the case again with the attack on the prison in Bannu. It is yet another incident involving a supposedly secure compound that will make many wonder what, if anything is safe from the militants.<\/p>\n
Pakistan’s Taliban said they carried out the attack, but the claim has not been verified.<\/p>\n
“We attacked the Bannu prison and got our special members freed,” Ehsanullah Ehsan, a Taliban spokesman, told Agence France-Presse.<\/p>\n
“In a couple of days when all of them have reached their designated places we will issue details about them. At the moment I cannot give you exact numbers.”<\/p>\n
A spokesman quoted by the Reuters news agency said hundreds of inmates had been freed.<\/p>\n
Officials described how militants in cars and pick-up trucks entered the complex shooting and throwing grenades.<\/p>\n
A total of 384 prisoners were freed in the attack, the Information Minister of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, said.<\/p>\n
He described at least 20 of the prisoners as very dangerous, and that Adnan Rashid, a former member of the air force sentenced to death for an attack on Mr Musharraf, was among those who escaped.<\/p>\n
Senior Bannu police official Iftikhar Khan told AFP that three police officers were wounded in the two-hour attack.<\/p>\n
The BBC’s Aleem Maqbool in Islamabad says the attack is clearly a setback for Pakistan’s security forces, who over the last year have gained considerable ground against militants in the north-west of the country.<\/p>\n
The Taliban carried out an audacious jail raid near Kandahar in Afghanistan in April last year, freeing at least 470 prisoners, including Taliban commanders and fighters.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Almost 400 prisoners have escaped from a prison in Pakistan after it was attacked by militants, officials say. At least 100 Islamist militants launched the assault on the jail in north-west Pakistan at 01:00 (20:00 GMT Saturday). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-business"],"yoast_head":"\n