Kabul, Afghanistan ? Afghanistan’s interim regime Thursday freed the first of hundreds of Pakistani prisoners locked away for months in cramped, squalid cells because they came to help the deposed Taliban regime fight a “holy war” against America.

The first 30 Pakistanis elderly men with long white beards and younger men who were wounded filed humbly into a Pakistani military plane and flew home guarded by heavily armed soldiers with red berets.

Pakistan said it would detain the men until authorities could verify they really were Pakistani citizens and determine whether they committed any serious crimes. At the very least, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan, the men crossed the border without proper documents. Khan described the release as a humanitarian effort on behalf of innocent or misled people.

Saeed Pasha, 42, said he had done nothing wrong. He was one of some 10,000 men from Pakistan’s Malakand region who threatened to go to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, but said he turned himself into authorities in northern Mazar-e-Sharif soon after arrival.

The prisoner release was the beginning of a mass return of Pakistanis detained in Afghanistan late last year when the northern alliance, backed by a U.S.-led air campaign, drove the Taliban religious militia from power.

Neither Afghan nor Pakistani officials had a count of how many Pakistani prisoners were being held in Afghan jails, other than to say they numbered in the hundreds. But an official in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, said 695 prisoners would be freed by Monday.

The conditions in Afghan prisons are often atrocious. In northern Shibergan, where some of those released Thursday were being held, the international Red Cross began an emergency feeding program last weekend because some prisoners were on the verge of starvation.

The 2,700 prisoners at Shibergan were packed so tightly into cells that they had to sleep in shifts there wasn’t room for all of them to lie down at once. Authorities have begun to move some prisoners into tents.