adminGunmen have launched an attack on a major prison in northwest Pakistan and are locked in a gunfight with police and security forces, officials have said. The attack on the prison in the town of Dera Ismail Khan, 200 miles west of Lahore, took place around midnight Monday, Reuters reported.
Fighting continued into the early hours yesterday. Security forces said they had imposed a curfew on the city.
Shaukat Yousafzai, the provincial information minister, said that police and the security forces returned fire to repel the attack and fighting was still raging inside the prison compound.
The attack began with up to 40 gunmen cutting off power supply to the prison and detonating heavy explosions that broke the outer walls, according to provincial prisons chief Khalid Abbas.
“It’s completely dark in there. We don’t know what’s going on but there is fighting,” he said.
District police chief Sohail Khalid said that the gunmen entered the prison using rocket propelled grenades and machineguns.
An Associated Press report said that Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. Shahidullah Shahid, a spokesman for the group, said 150 militants took part in the attack and around 300 prisoners were freed.
The prison holds hundreds of Taliban and other militants.
Dera Ismail Khan in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province is adjacent to South Waziristan, Pakistan’s restive, mountainous tribal region near the border with Afghanistan.
In a similar incident last April, close to 400 prisoners, including at least 20 described by police as “very dangerous” insurgents, were freed in an assault on a prison in the city of Bannu in northwest Pakistan. — Presstv.
Online Reporter