Al-Qaeda militants free prisoners and loot banks at Mukalla, capital city of the #Hadhramaut coastal region in #Yemen pic.twitter.com/Mo9YQeOVXA
— Zaid Benjamin (@zaidbenjamin) April 2, 2015
ISTANBUL – Around 1 a.m. on Thursday, masked gunmen armed with RPGs, hand grenades, and assault rifles stormed a central security prison in eastern Yemen, freeing more than 300 prisoners, including a top al-Qaeda commander.
Pictures posted to Twitter, apparently pulled from CCTV footage near the prison, show a pickup truck full of heavily armed men near the prison. Other photos capture a large explosion punching through the dark sky and, in another, an open gate with several figures walking away.
The prison break in al-Mukalla freed Khalid Ba Tarfi, an AQAP regional commander who was captured in 2011, and hundreds of others. In recent years, Yemen’s prisons have become de facto jihadi academies as more hardened veterans have been dumped into communal cells with younger more impressionable prisoners.