Taliban recount great escape

Taliban fighters who escaped from an Afghan prison alongside hundreds of comrades have described how they crawled to freedom along a stifling tunnel lined with lights and an air pipe.

Taliban fighters who escaped from an Afghan prison alongside hundreds of comrades have described how they crawled to freedom along a stifling tunnel lined with lights and an air pipe.

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One said he spent half an hour scrambling through the kilometre-long tunnel from Kandahar prison in to a nearby safe house, before being arrested by police suspicious of his dirty clothes and bare feet.

Another Taliban militant told of how cells in the supposedly high-security prison were routinely left unlocked, allowing easy access to the man-made tunnel, which the Taliban say they took five months to dig.

Some 488 prisoners, many of them Taliban, escaped the jail late Sunday.