Gunmen kidnap 2 foreign aid workers in Somalia

Gunmen kidnapped two foreign aid workers in northern Somalia on Wednesday, officials said. “Two foreign aid workers were kidnapped,” said Abdirahman Mohamed Bangah, the information minister in the Puntland region. “We are collecting more information.”

The victims are female employees of the international aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, said Sahro Sheik Muse, who lives near the MSF building in Puntland. She said one was Spanish and the other was from Argentina.

“Six gunmen armed with AK-47s blocked a minibus carrying the female aid workers, then they impounded their mobile phones and ordered the driver and a translator to go away,” Muse told The Associated Press by telephone.

The region's deputy governor, Yusuf Mumin Bidde, confirmed the kidnapping but had no further information. A spokeswoman for MSF in Nairobi, Kenya, said she could not confirm the abductions.

Calls to the Spanish Embassy were not immediately returned. A French journalist was kidnapped in the same region on Dec. 16, but he was released after eight days.

Puntland is associated with coastal piracy and known as a staging post for human traffickers running boats into Yemen. T

he region is about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) north of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, which is at the center of an Islamic insurgency that has killed thousands of people this year. The United Nations says Somalia is facing Africa's worst humanitarian crisis.