Aid workers freed by kidnappers leave Somalia
By Guled Mohamed
MOGADISHU, May 16 (Reuters) - Two foreign aid workers kidnapped last week in northern Somalia were flying to Kenya on Wednesday after their captors were persuaded to hand them over to local clan elders.
A Briton and a Kenyan working for the CARE International relief agency had been seized by gunmen as a bargaining chip in a dispute with authorities in semi-autonomous Puntland region.
A Puntland journalist, Abdiqani Hassan, said the men arrived in the main port Bossasso early on Wednesday and were taken to the presidential palace before boarding a plane for Nairobi.
"We are relieved that this situation has been resolved with no one being harmed," David Gilmour, who directs CARE projects in Somalia, said in a statement.
CARE would resume work in Puntland as soon as it received assurances it was once again stable and peaceful, he said.
Contacted by satellite telephone at an undisclosed location in the north, the kidnappers' leader said the pair had been freed after successful negotiations with the local authorities.
"We handed them over to the elders whom we have been talking to," the man, who only identified himself as Mohamed, told Reuters. "The little problems between us and Puntland were resolved and, as we promised, we released them alive."
He gave no other details, but local people have said a minister from the kidnappers' clan had been recently fired from the Puntland administration.
There have also been suggestions the aid workers were seized by members of a fishing community which is in dispute with the authorities over permits and impounded fishing vessels.
Puntland runs itself independently of the rest of Somalia and has been more peaceful than most areas in recent years.
But the whole country, which has been deprived of effective central rule for 16 years, is dangerous for aid workers.
On Tuesday, gunmen attacked a U.N. World Health Organisation office in the capital Mogadishu, wounding a guard. Two days earlier U.N. aid chief John Holmes cut short a visit to the city after bombs planted by insurgents killed three people.
