KABUL (AFP) — Around half the 2,000 prisoners who escaped worldwide in the past three years broke out of jails in Afghanistan, where many of the escapees were "terrorists", the Interpol chief said Friday.
Ronald K. Noble, secretary general of the international policy agency, was in Afghanistan to push authorities to start fingerprinting and photographing prisoners for input into a global database to track dangerous escapees.
In the past three years more than 2,000 prisoners had escaped globally, Noble told AFP in an interview. They had fled in 62 prison breaks in 43 countries, according to statistics provided separately by Interpol.
"In many of those countries the prison escapes have been of convicted terrorists for whom there have been no arrest warrants issued, for whom there have been no photographs circulated," Noble said.
In Afghanistan there have been three major escapes, two in 2006 and one in the southern city of Kandahar in June this year when the insurgent Taliban militia used several suicide bombers to blow open the main prison.
"Almost 1,000 total people have escaped (in Afghanistan) and of those... close to 400 to 500 would be terrorists. A substantial number," Noble said.
Interpol had however only been able to get basic details, like the names and places of birth, of about a third of the nearly 1,000 who had escaped, among them Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants, said Noble, the most senior Interpol official to visit Afghanistan.
He said he had secured a commitment from Afghan officials to fingerprint and photograph every person arrested for a terrorist-related activity.
Noble also called for more worldwide cooperation on fake travel documents, saying "terrorists" were able to move between countries on fraudulent visas and passports.
Sharing such data had, for example, allowed authorities to ascertain that a militant involved in an attack in Iraq had also been connected to one in Morocco.
Afghanistan's embattled police force meanwhile needed more international training and support to build on international military successes against insurgents on the battlefield, Noble said.
"If we don't invest more money in police, all the gains that are achieved on the battlefield will be lost once the military leaves," he said.
Noble cited interior ministry figures that around 750 police office had been killed in the first six months of this year, most of them in insurgency-linked attacks, and 1,250 wounded.
"A number of these terrorist attacks against the police involve people coming from Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya," he said, adding this showed the need for an international approach to fighting militancy.
"It is not only a homegrown terrorist problem. You also have terrorists coming from neighbouring countries."
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