US forces hunting four Arab militants who escaped from the heavily fortified American headquarters in Afghanistan have found the prisoners' discarded jumpsuits, a military source said overnight. The find outside the detention centre of the Bagram Air Base north of Kabul ends US military speculation the escapees could have been hiding somewhere inside the sprawling airfield."We found the orange jumpsuits they were wearing outside the detention centre," the US source said on condition of anonymity. The centre is buried deep within the grounds of the air base. "There were some elements that allowed them to escape and we fixed them," the military source added, without elaborating.
| Brief mental picture of Mahmoud the Rat being gelded with a dull entrenching tool.. |
As Afghan and US forces searched for the men for a fourth day, a spokesman for the Taliban regime claimed to have located them and brought them to an undisclosed location within Afghanistan. "The four prisoners who escaped Bagram prison are safe and are with us now. They joined mujahideen at 10:00 am today. They are in Afghanistan," Mullah Abdul Latif Hakimi said. Hakimi has previously made inflated or untrue claims about clashes in Afghanistan between the Taliban and coalition forces.
US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jerry O'Hara told AFP the search operation was still ongoing and the circumstances surrounding their escape were still under investigation. General Mahboob Amiri, head of Afghanistan's police quick reaction force, told AFP that the search had moved to the Koh-i-Safi hills around Bagram.
Locals in the villages around Bagram told AFP that US troops had visited offering rewards, displaying the pictures of the detainees and appealing for information. "They came here and gave their phone numbers and distributed pictures of the men," said Mohammed Alem, a 22-year-old farmer in Ghulam Ali village. Bagram houses the majority of about 500 terror suspects held by US forces in Afghanistan.
The escape was a fresh blow to US forces in Afghanistan, coming less than two weeks after 19 soldiers were killed in the biggest single loss suffered by the American contingent in the country. The Taliban and their allies are still waging an insurgency in the country's restive south and east which has left more than 600 people dead, most of them militants, since the start of the year.