Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The aid worker's driver was wounded when the kidnappers intercepted his vehicle in an area claimed by both the breakaway states of Puntland and Somaliland.
"He was heading to Waqadiriya area outside Erigabo when he was snatched by the militias," Abdalla Salah Botan, an elder in the district of Erigabo said.
The elder said the abducted aid worker was employed by German Agro Action, a non-governmental organisation which has been operating in the area for several years.
Contacted in Bonn, the aid group -- known in Germany as Welthungerhilfe -- confirmed that one of its employees had been abducted in northern Somalia.
In the area where the abduction took place, German Agro Action -- which has been active in Somalia since 1992 -- was leading a project on irrigated farming development.
"We have been told that militias in the region kidnapped a foreign aid worker but the area he was kidnapped in is not under our administration," Puntland information ministry official Bile Mohamoud Qabowsade told AFP.
Aid workers, notably foreigners, have been increasingly targeted in all parts of the restive Horn of Africa country.
Three staff of Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF - Doctors Without Borders) were killed in January in an roadside bomb explosion against their vehicle in the southern town of Kismayo, forcing the international NGO to pull its foreign staff out of Somalia.
The victims were a Kenyan doctor, a French logistics expert and a Somali driver.
Late last year, two women from Spain and Argentina working for MSF were abducted in Puntland. Days earlier, a French cameraman preparing a documentary on migrants was also snatched. All three were eventually released unharmed.
Somaliland and Puntland have been engaged in a sometimes violent feud over two territories -- Sool and Sanaag -- which straddle their ill-defined common border.
A former British protectorate, Somaliland united with the Italian Somalia in 1960. But it unilaterally broke away 10 months after dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted in 1991.
Somaliland, which adopted a provisional constitution in 1997 and ratified it four years later, now boasts its own president, government, parliament, police force, penal code and currency.
Its officials have fiercely rejected any suggestion of re-uniting with Somalia proper, and the transitional government in Mogadishu is opposed to any kind of recognition for the region.
Neighbouring Puntland declared itself autonomous in August 1998 under the leadership of Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the current Somali president.
The latest abduction comes amid reports that the Islamist insurgents who had been battling Somali government troops and their Ethiopian allies in Mogadishu for months have started to expand their area of operations.
Source: AFP, Feb 12, 2008