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Somali gunmen kidnap two aid workers: charity
MOGADISHU | Fri Oct 15, 2010 5:32am EDT
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Somali gunmen kidnapped two people working for Save The Children in the Horn of Africa country late on Thursday, the British charity said. Local residents said the abductors had taken the hostages to an area controlled by al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab rebels. "We can confirm that two of our members of staff were taken by armed gunmen in a Somali town near the Ethiopian border yesterday," Save the Children said in a statement.
"At this point, we don't know any more about their whereabouts or wellbeing," it said. Initial reports said one of two was from Zimbabwe, although others said he was British. The British Foreign Office said it was aware of the reports and was urgently investigating. It was not immediately clear whether al Shabaab was behind the kidnapping. "We still don't know who attacked the two. Some people say they are pirates and others say they are Islamists," local official Mohamed Awale told Reuters.
Islamist militants have fought a three-year insurgency to topple Somalia's fragile interim government, which they say is a puppet of the West, and want to impose a strict version of sharia law on the country. The chaos on land has allowed piracy to flourish in the Gulf of Aden, one of the world's busiest shipping lanes linking Europe with Africa and Asia. Mohamed Ali, a local administrator, told Reuters the gunmen had taken the hostages close to the district of Elbur, a known al Shabaab stronghold.
"The kidnappers reached Xiin Dhere village which is controlled by al Shabaab," he said. Kidnapping is a lucrative business for Somali criminals, notably for pirates operating off the shores of the lawless nation, who typically treat their captives well, seeing them as an investment on which they expect to earn a ransom. But the capture of foreign nationals has become relatively rare across much of the country because the region has become very dangerous for foreign aid workers.
(Reporting by Ibrahim Mohamed and Mohamed Ahmed in Mogadishu and Michael Holden in London; Writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
