By msnbc.com news services
Updated at 5 p.m. ET
MOGADISHU, Somalia -- ???Gunmen kidnapped an American man in the northern Somali town of Galkayo on Saturday, officials said, the same day an airstrike killed a senior insurgent leader with ties to al-Qaida in another part of the country.
The gunmen surrounded the man's car shortly after the man left the airport, said policeman Abdi Hassan Nur, who witnessed the incident. He said they then forced the American into another vehicle.
Local government officials said ?they believed the assailants had been the man's own guards and might be linked to a pirate gang.
"Gunmen kidnapped the foreigner and we understand they took him to Hobyo," Abshir Dini, interior minister of the semi-autonomous region, told Reuters, referring to a coastal town that is a known pirate base.
Galkayo is on the border between the semiautonomous northern region of Puntland and a region known as Galmudug. It is ruled by forces friendly to the U.N.-backed Somali government.
A minister from the Galmudug administration said the gunmen severely beat the foreigner's Somali companion when he begged them not to take the man. The minister spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
A staff member at the Embassy Hotel, where the man was staying, said the American had gone to the airport to drop off an Indian colleague. The hotel said that the man had both American and German citizenship. The staff member asked not to be identified because he was not supposed to give out information about guests.
In October, gunmen kidnapped an American woman and a Danish man working for the Danish Demining Group from the same town. They are still being held.
Kidnapping for ransom is has become increasingly common in Somalia over the past five years. Currently at least four aid workers, a French military official, a British tourist taken from Kenya and hundreds of sailors are being held captive.
In a separate incident in the south of the country outside the capital of Mogadishu, a British-Lebanese commander of the al-Shabab militant group was killed along with two others when a missile struck the car they were traveling in, al-Shabab spokesman Sheik Ali Rage said.
Rage identified the British-Lebanese commander as Bilal-Berjawi, saying he was a close associate of late al-Qaida operative Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the mastermind behind the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania who was killed by a Somali soldier in June 2011.
Further south, another airstrike killed six people near the insurgent stronghold of Kismayo on Saturday, according to Sheik Mohamud Abdi, a senior al-Shabab commander. Kenya sent troops into Somalia in October amid concerns that Somalia's 21-year-old civil war was spilling over the countries' joint border.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this story.
More from msnbc.com and NBC News:
lsu football bcs jay z glory alabama crimson tide barry larkin at the drive in jay z new song
কোন মন্তব্য নেই:
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন