BAGHDAD (AFP) – Militants attacked two Iraqi prisons, including notorious Abu Ghraib, with mortars, bombs and gunfire, freeing at least 500 inmates in assaults that cost more than 40 lives, officials said Monday.
The coordinated attacks on the prison in Taji, north of Baghdad, and Abu Ghraib, west of the capital, were launched on Sunday night and triggered fighting that raged for around 10 hours, officials said.
Abu Ghraib prison, already infamous as a centre for the torture of opponents of now-executed dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, gained further notoriety in 2004 when graphic pictures emerged showing prisoners being humiliated and abused by their U.S. guards.
A frenzy of comments posted on social media, including some Twitter accounts apparently operated by jihadists, claimed that thousands of prisoners had escaped.
The two prisons had held around 10,000 inmates between them, an interior ministry official said.
“About 500 prisoners escaped from Abu Ghraib prison,” Hakem al-Zamili, a member of the parliamentary security and defence committee, told AFP.
He said the escaped prisoners were “terrorists” and that, to his knowledge, no inmates managed to break out in Taji.
However, MP Shwan Taha, also a security and defence committee member, said in an online statement that between 500 and 1,000 inmates escaped from the two prisons.
Officials said at least 20 members of the security forces were killed and 40 wounded in the attacks. And the justice ministry’s spokesman said 21 inmates were killed and 25 wounded in rioting at the prisons.
It was not immediately clear how many of the militants who attacked the prison were killed, wounded or captured.
The attacks were launched at around 9:30 pm (1830 GMT) on Sunday when the militants fired mortar rounds at the prisons.
Car bombs were detonated near the entrances to the prisons, while three suicide bombers attacked the Taji prison, a police colonel said. Five roadside bombs also exploded near the prison in Taji.
Fighting continued throughout the night and the situation was eventually brought under control on Monday morning, according to the colonel.
The interior ministry had issued a statement before midnight (2100 GMT) on Sunday saying the attacks had already been foiled.
But a statement released by the ministry on Monday said that prisoners had escaped and were still on the loose.
“This incident resulted in the escape of a number of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison” but none from that in Taji, the statement said, adding that an initial investigation indicated that some prison guards were culpable.
The attacks on the prisons came a year after Al-Qaeda’s Iraq front group announced it would target the country’s justice system.
“The first priority in this is releasing Muslim prisoners everywhere, and chasing and eliminating judges and investigators and their guards,” said an audio message attributed to the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi last year.
Prisons in Iraq have previously been hit by escape attempts, uprisings and other unrest.
Deadly violence also hit security forces in northern Iraq on Monday.
A suicide bomber blew up a vehicle near an army patrol in the city of Mosul, killing 12 people and wounding 16, while a bomb killed a soldier near the city.
In the city of Kirkuk, gunmen shot dead Abdullah Sami al-Asi, a provincial councillor and deputy head of the province’s security committee, along with two of his guards.
In the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, gunmen attacked a police station, wounding one policeman, while one attacker was killed and another wounded.
Attacks elsewhere in the province killed an anti-Qaeda militiaman, a soldier and a police officer.
And a roadside bomb killed two people and wounded five in Madain, south of Baghdad.
Iraq has faced years of attacks by militants, but analysts say a fresh upsurge of violence has been fuelled by discontent among members of its Sunni Arab minority, which the Shiite-led government has failed to address.
With the latest attacks, more than 600 people have been killed in violence so far this month and over 2,800 since the beginning of the year, according to AFP figures based on security and medical sources.
