3 aid workers kidnapped in Somalia

Somali gunmen kidnapped three foreign aid workers on Saturday in a raid on a Kenyan border town, the latest attack on relief workers, an official and Somali residents said.

"The authorities in Mandera [in Kenya] told us that those aid workers had been kidnapped. We're now going to run after them," Sheikh Osman, an al Shabaab official in the neighbouring district in Somalia, said.

The nationalities of the aid workers and the organisation for which they were working were not immediately clear.

Kidnappings in the Horn of Africa nation are fairly common -- usually of Somalis, sometimes of foreigners and increasingly of ship crews off the coast. They are a symptom of an 18-year conflict that has killed tens of thousands.

In the past, most foreigners kidnapped in Somalia have been released unharmed after a ransom payment.

On Friday, Somalia's Al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab movement took possession of two French hostages seized at a Mogadishu hotel on Tuesday. The Frenchmen were working as security advisers to President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed's government.

Al Shabaab was the armed wing of the Islamic Courts movement that controlled Mogadishu and much of the south in 2006 before being ousted by an Ethiopian offensive.

Source: ABC

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