MOGADISHU (Thomson Financial) - A World Food Programme employee and his chauffeur are feared dead in Somalia after a botched kidnapping, a U.N. official said Sunday citing a third member of their party who got away.
'The information we are getting indicates that the kidnappers killed the WFP officer, because the man who was with them managed to escape when the gunmen opened fire on them,' a U.N. official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
While information remained sketchy, the official said that 'the hope that those men are alive is fading.'
'They kidnapped the officer, his driver and another relative on Friday night,' he added.
He said they had heard nothing since 'until we get this horrible information,' although he stressed that 'things are still complicated' with no proof they have been killed.
A local elder said no bodies had been found, but that blood was discovered at the scene.
'The man who escaped told us that the U.N. officer and his driver were killed by the militias, and this information seems to be true, because some people who went to the scene saw blood,' Mohamed Moalim Nur, in Dinsoor, told AFP.
The kidnapping of the local WFP deputy treasurer took place around 350 kilometres (210 miles) west of Mogadishu.
The WFP agency distributes aid to around 2.3 million people each month across strife-wracked Somalia, with the UN warning that as many as 3.5 million people will need food assistance before the year because of persistent drought, inflation and insecurity.
Aid workers are often targeted in the restive Horn of Africa nation. Five WFP chauffeurs have already been killed this year.
Late July, an exiled hardline Islamist leader based in Eritrea called for assassinations and kidnappings targeting aid workers to stop 'immediately and without delay.'
Ethiopian troops came to the rescue of Somalia's embattled and internationally-backed transitional government in late 2006, ousting an Islamist militia that had briefly controlled large parts of the country.
Civilians have borne the brunt of subsequent fighting, with international rights groups and aid agencies saying that at least 6,000 have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced over the past year alone.
Somalia has been plagued by civil fighting and defied more than a dozen peace initiatives since the 1991 overthrow of former president Mohamed Siad Barre led to chaos.
The United Nations sponsored a new peace initiative which led to the signing on June 9 in Djibouti of a truce agreement between the government and the main Islamist-dominated opposition movement.
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