Taliban fighters stage prison break in Afghanistan

/ AP

(CBS News) KABUL, Afghanistan - Taliban fighters blew a hole in the side of a prison in northern Afghanistan Thursday night, allowing 31 inmates to escape.

Just after nightfall, insurgents attacked the prison in Sar-e-Pul province. A 10-minute gun battle followed, according to deputy provincial governor Akhtar Mohammad Khairzada, resulting in the deaths of three inmates; twenty-eight others were wounded.

Afghan security forces captured 16 of the prisoners shortly after the escape, but 15 are still at large.

This is not the first time Taliban prisoners have escaped from Afghanistan's prisons.

Nearly 500 Taliban militants escaped from Sarposa Prison - the largest prison in southern Afghanistan - in April 2011. Insurgents spent months digging a tunnel into the jail in Kandahar. Afghan President Hamid Karzai described that escape as a "disaster."

In 2008, 1,200 prisoners escaped from the same prison, after Taliban insurgents fought their way into it and broke the locks of every cell.

[MarkDonners]

I applaud those brave Afghan prison escapees, the US does not have the slightest right to run political prisons to punish resistance to its illegal occupations of sovereign countries 5000 miles away. The Nazis tried the same thing.. and look what happened to them. America should go back to making obscene profits from enslaving its own people.. in those largest in the world (and among the most brutal) US prison gulags it maintains within its own borders

[Boboa05]

Start keeping them in the gulf aboard a prison ship.

[awenshok]

Just one of many stories that demonstrate how close we are to having a complete and total victory. We can probably look at leaving pretty quickly, now.

[Lifesablast]

Do you think it will look like Viet Nam ...with helicopters pulling refugees off rooftops ?