Somali gunmen kidnapped two Libyan diplomats in Mogadishu’s busy Bakara market on Saturday, a driver for the two men said.
”Ten men with pistols in their hands surrounded us. They seized the two diplomats and left with the car,” the driver, who declined to give his name for fear of reprisal, said.
The two diplomats were, however, released hours later.
The driver said that two men approached a few minutes before and asked him and the bodyguard accompanying the diplomats who the passengers were.
A Reuters reporter who went to the Libyan embassy in Mogadishu said two other diplomats there declined to comment.
The diplomats were shopping in Bakara, which is the seaside Somali capital’s biggest market and a hotbed of insurgents fighting the Somali interim government and their Ethiopian military backers.
Kidnappings are common in Somalia, and captives are generally treated well because their captors consider them an investment on which they can earn a handsome return in the form of a ransom.
But outright killings and attacks have been far more common than kidnappings over the last year in Mogadishu, since the government and Ethiopians kicked out militant Islamists who controlled the city.
That has sparked an insurgency that has resulted in Iraq-style guerrilla attacks on government targets and reprisal assaults targeting entire pro-insurgent neighbourhoods with artillery and tanks.
A local human rights group estimates at least 6 500 people have been killed in the fighting this year. The United Nations says one million people have fled their homes in fighting in the Horn of Africa nation this year, 600 000 of them from Mogadishu. — Reuters