Militants seized control of a prison in the Iraqi city of Tikrit last night after fierce clashes with guards that left at least two dead, a deputy governor and security officials said.

The assault comes after Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi front group announced a campaign to regain territory and said it aimed to help its jailed members escape.

“The attackers are controlling all the (entrances and exits) and the observation towers, and ... security forces are surrounding the prison,” Salaheddin provincial deputy governor Ahmed Abdul Jabbar Abdul Karim said by telephone.

An interior ministry official also said the gunmen took control of all the exits and entrances to the prison in Tikrit, 160 kilometres north of Baghdad, and that two police were killed in the fighting.

A police officer put the toll from attack at four police and two gunmen killed.

Accounts differed as to whether the unrest began with an outside assault, a riot inside the prison, or possibly both.

“A suicide bomber targeted the gate of the prison with a car bomb and gunmen then assaulted the prison, after which they killed the guards,” a police lieutenant colonel said.

A police colonel said there were “clashes between police and gunmen inside the prison.”

Another colonel said riots broke out inside the prison, after which police sought to bring them under control.

“The prisoners killed one policeman and wounded (prison director) Brigadier General Laith al-Sagmani,” the colonel said, adding that “the gunmen took control of the prison, and clashes are continuing.”

A traffic police lieutenant colonel who was near the scene of the attack said militants blew up a portion of the prison fence, and that between 30 and 40 prisoners were able to escape.

And other witnesses said prisoners seized the guards’ weapons, and that more than 100 of them escaped and fought security forces in the surrounding area.

The tactics employed in the assault were reminiscent of those used in recent attacks.