Afghan forces have recaptured at least 65 of the 480 inmates who escaped from the south's largest prison

Afghan forces have recaptured at least 65 of the 480 inmates who escaped from the south's largest prison, the government said on Tuesday.

Prison officials discovered early on Monday morning that the inmates – nearly all of them Taliban militants – were missing from their cells, and then found the tunnel through which they appeared to have made their getaway.

The Taliban said the jailbreak was five months in the making, with diggers starting the tunnel from under a nearby house while they arranged for inmates to get cell keys.

The Kandahar provincial governor's office said that Afghan and international forces are working together to recapture the missing prisoners. It said the troops have already caught 65 and killed two who tried to resist. Authorities have biometric data on each prisoner, the statement added.

The prison break came less than two weeks after the Kandahar police chief was killed by a suicide bomber inside his heavily defended office compound.

"How can we trust or rely on a government that can't protect the police chief inside the police headquarters and can't keep prisoners in the prison?" asked Islamullah Agha Bashir, who sells washing machines and other appliances in Kandahar city. "Last night while we were eating dinner I told my two sons not to go out as much because I am afraid that now when the morale of the Taliban is high, they will attack more."

In Kabul, officials started to piece through the details of the escape and place blame. The justice minister, Habibullah Ghalib, sent a formal letter to President Hamid Karzai acknowledging that it was likely that prison officials or guards acted as accomplices but adding that Afghan and international security forces should have detected the plot.

"The escape of all the prisoners from one tunnel ... shows that collaborators inside the prison somehow provided an opportunity," it said.

However, Ghalib also noted that Afghan police searched the compound from which the tunnel originated about two and a half months before the prison break and he said that Canadian and US forces have been responsible for security improvements to the prison. A full investigation was under way.

Kandahar city has been a major focus of the international troop surge over the past year, with Nato officials saying that establishing security there will be key to securing the region. Last summer, Afghan forces created a ring of checkpoints around the city and started pushing out into Taliban areas on its outskirts in a plan to establish the government's authority before the rise in attacks that usually comes with warmer weather in the spring and summer.

The Taliban have responding by starting off the spring fighting season with a string of attacks apparently designed to undermine trust in the capabilities of the Afghan government. Within the past two weeks, Taliban agents have also launched deadly attacks from inside the defence ministry a shared Afghan-US military base in eastern Laghman province.

The attacks have exposed weaknesses that have also raised doubt over the readiness of the Afghan government to start taking over authority for security parts of the country as planned.

Nato-led coalition forces announced on Tuesday that a key al-Qaida operative in Afghanistan had been killed in an air strike on 13 April in Dangam district of eastern Kunar province.

Nato said Abu Hafs al-Najdi, also known as Abdul Ghani, was a regional commander in charge of suicide bombings and cash flow. The strike also killed a number of other insurgents, including another al-Qaida leader known as Waqas.

In eastern Paktia province on Tuesday, the provincial governor narrowly escaped an apparent assassination attempt by insurgents. A roadside bomb exploded just behind a vehicle taking Juma Khan Hamdard to his office, said Rohallah Samon, a spokesman.

Hamdard was not hurt, but three policemen who were in a chase vehicle were slightly injured, Samon said.