Ten prisoners escape from Philippine jail

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(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-12-24 19:47

MANILA -- Ten prisoners, including five suspected Abu Sayyaf members, escaped from a jail in the southern Philippines on Wednesday, an official said.

The jailbreak took place on Wednesday morning at the Basilan Provincial Reformatory Center, said Salik Macapantar, police chief of the province.

Nine have been recaptured, including two suspected Abu Sayyaf members who were wounded in the escape try, the official was quoted in an on-line report by the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

Bensali Jabarani, police chief of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, said the inmates took advantage of the loose security inside the compound of the detention center in the village of Sumagdang in Isabela City.

Jabarani said the inmates were performing physical fitness exercises when they suddenly grabbed the gun of the lone guard.

The inmates then shot the guard, who suffered minor gunshot wounds.

The 370-member Abu Sayyaf group, a listed international terrorist organization, has been accused of engineering a series of bloody public attacks and kidnappings in the Philippines in recent years.

The Philippine government, aided by the US military, has deployed thousands of troops in the Abu Sayyaf's strong-hold Basilan and Sulu provinces to scale up the operation against the group.

The authority vowed to stamp out insurgency in conflict-torn Mindanao by 2010.