/ 28 April 2009

Somali gunmen free aid workers

Somali gunmen freed two European aid workers on Tuesday without receiving a ransom after holding the pair hostage for nine days in one of the world’s most dangerous places for relief agencies.

Attacks on humanitarian staff in the Horn of Africa country have cut their ability to help in one of the world’s worst emergencies. More than one million Somalis have been uprooted by fighting in two years and three million survive on food aid.

Gunmen seized a Belgian doctor and Dutch nurse working for Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) on April 19 in the central Bakol region, where the pair had been carrying out a nutrition study.

Dutchman Kees Keus told Reuters TV by telephone that he and his colleague had been held prisoner in the bush since then.

”We are happy and we are on our way to our families. We were released by the authorities and the elders of the area where MSF is working,” Keus said in an interview.

Sheikh Aden Yare, a leader of the al-Shabaab rebels who control the area, said the pair had been released without condition. His Islamist insurgent group had said its fighters would free the hostages by force if negotiations failed.

Shabaab, which Washington accuses of links to al-Qaeda, controls large parts of central and southern Somalia and has invited international aid agencies to operate in its territory.

”They are with us and we are going to Hudur to hand over the MSF officers,” Yare told Reuters. ”This will not happen again.”

A Bakol elder involved in the talks with the gunmen said the two men were in good health and that no ransom had been paid.

The gunmen holding the aid workers had initially demanded a ransom of $1-million, then increased it to $4-million.

Kidnappings in Somalia, which has been mired in civil conflict for 18 years, are usually blamed on clan militia or Islamist insurgents fighting the government and a small African Union peacekeeping mission, AMISOM, in the capital Mogadishu.

The gunmen generally treat hostages relatively well in the hope of a sizeable ransom payment.

International donors pledged at least $213-million last week to bolster the Somali security forces and help pay for AMISOM.

The country has been in chaos since warlords toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and then turned on each other. President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed’s new administration is the 15th attempt to set up a central government since then. — Reuters