Byline: Tom Coghlan Kabul

The hostages played game after game of draughts with their Taleban captors until the guards became drowsy. Then they made their big move.

With the gunmen asleep on the floor beside them, the two hostages crept to the window, dropped a length of old rope they had hidden during months of captivity, shimmied down and raced to freedom.

The extraordinary escape of a Pulitzer prize-winning American journalist and his Afghan translator from Islamic militants was described yesterday for the first time.

David Rohde, 41, a New York Times reporter, and Tahir Luddin, 34, an Afghan journalist who has worked for The Times for several years, fled after being held for seven months in a lawless region in northwest Pakistan described as "the most dangerous place on Earth" by US officials and a haven for al-Qaeda and the Taleban.

Mr Luddin told how they sneaked past sleeping guards at the Taleban prison near the town of Miram Shah after tiring out the men with repeated games of draughts. He described the attempt as a "suicide mission" that he felt was almost certainly doomed to fail. But after months in captivity the pair believed that they would be killed if they did make a bid for freedom.

At the time of his disappearance Mr Rohde was working on a book about US involvement in Afghanistan and had hired the services of two Afghan employees of this newspaper - Mr Luddin, 34, and Assadullah Mangal, 22, a driver - for a day's work. They disappeared on November 10 last year an hour's drive south of...