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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 yesterday.
The co-ordinated attacks on Taji prison, 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 US 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, said.
He said the escaped prisoners were "terrorists" but that, to his knowledge, no inmates managed to break out from Taji.
However, MP Shwan Taha, also a security and defence committee member, said 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 militants started the attacks by launching mortars at the prisons on Sunday evening.
Car bombs were detonated near the entrances to the prisons, while three suicide bombers attacked Taji prison, a police colonel said. Five roadside bombs also exploded near the prison.
The military deployed aircraft and sent in reinforcements around the two facilities as fighting continued throughout the night. The situation was eventually brought under control yesterday morning, according to the colonel.
The attacks 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.
Deadly violence also hit security forces yesterday in northern Iraq. 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 Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, gunmen attacked a police station, wounding one policeman. One attacker was killed. .


At least 500 freed in raids on Iraqi jails

 A member of US military personnel talks to a detainee waiting to be released at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Photo: AP

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More than 40 dead as Abu Gharib and another prison are attacked by militants


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 yesterday.
