GARISSA, Kenya — Gunmen kidnapped two Spanish women working for the aid group Doctors Without Borders at a refugee camp in Kenya on Thursday, the third abduction in a month of westerners in the country by attackers linked to Somalia.
Kenyan police said they suspected that Somalia’s al Qaeda-linked al-Shabab insurgents were behind the kidnapping and added that security forces had chased the abductors toward the border between the two countries, which has been sealed.
“Two female aid workers working for MSF were . . . kidnapped by suspected al-Shabab militants in the Dadaab refugee camp,” North Eastern Province Police Cmdr. Leo Nyongesa said, using the initals for the aid group’s French name, Medecins Sans Frontieres.
“We’ve mobilized all the officers and alerted those at the border to ensure that no vehicle exits the country to Somalia,” he said. “The whole border area is now sealed.”
No group has asserted responsibility for the attack.
Doctors Without Borders said a driver was wounded in the attack on its staff.
“He’s currently hospitalized and stable. Two international staff are missing. A crisis team has been set up to deal with this incident,” the group said in a statement.
A spokesman at the Spanish Foreign Ministry confirmed that the missing women were Spanish.
Thursday’s incident took place within weeks of two separate incidents in which Somali gunmen seized Western female tourists from beach resorts in northern Kenya.
Analysts and diplomats in the region had warned that pirates were likely to turn to softer targets, such as tourists in Kenya, in response to much more robust defense of merchant vessels by private security guards.
Security experts say they fear that Islamist militants fighting to topple the Western-backed Somali government could increasingly conduct copycat attacks inside Kenya, the region’s biggest economy.
Dadaab, located about 60 miles from the Somali border, was set up in 1991 to accommodate Somalis fleeing violence and famine in their country. It has since grown to become the world’s biggest refugee camp, with more than 400,000 residents.
Britain has issued a travel advisory warning against all but essential travel within about 95 miles of the Somali border, which includes the popular Lamu archipelago where a French woman and a British woman were seized in recent weeks.
— Reuters
Loading...
Comments