Nearly 2,000 inmates escaped during Sunday's attack on a military barracks, a prison and other locations in Sierra Leone, officials said on Monday. Colonel Shek Suleiman Masakui, Acting Director General of the Sierra Leone Correctional Service, said the attack lasted two hours. The assailants had sent the West African country thrown into panic in the early hours when gunfire was sent ringing across the capital Freetown. The government blamed "renegade soldiers" that it said had been repelled.