Nairobi: Four foreign aid workers kidnapped in Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp returned safely to Nairobi on Monday tired but smiling after being released overnight in southern Somalia following a short gunfight.
The two men and two women with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) looked exhausted and were covered in dust after their three day ordeal, but managed a weary smile to reporters before they boarded buses and left the airport.
“We are happy to be alive, we are happy this has ended,” said Canadian-Pakistan national Qurat-Ul-Ain Sadazai as she and colleagues — from Canada, Norway and the Philippines — arrived in Nairobi by Kenyan military helicopter.
NRC said in a statement it was “relieved and pleased” at their release, naming them respectively as Steven Dennis, 37, Astrid Sehl, 33, Glenn Costes, 40 and Sadazai, 38.
Costes limped from a bullet wound to the leg, but the four appeared to be otherwise in good health after arriving from the southern Somali border town of Dhobley, where they been freed earlier on Monday.
“They were released by a joint force of Somali and Kenyan forces, during which one of the kidnappers was killed,” Kenyan army spokesman Cyrus Oguna told AFP. Three others were arrested.
Mohamed Dini Adan, a Somali military commander in Dhobley, an area under control of Somali forces allied to Kenya, said the army had stopped the “kidnappers who were trying to hide and sneak past the army.”
Kenya, which invaded southern Somalia in October to attack Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab insurgents, has troops some 120 kilometres (75 miles) deep into Somalia. However, the forces control only pockets of the vast territory.
The kidnapping was the latest in a series of attacks in Dadaab, where gunmen last October seized two Spaniards working for Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). They are still being held hostage in Somalia.
The abduction of the Spaniards was one of the incidents that spurred Kenya to send troops and tanks into Somalia to fight the hardline Shebab whom Nairobi blames for abductions and cross-border raids.
On Sunday, gunmen killed 17 people in the worst attack in a decade that Kenya blamed on the Shebab, with masked insurgents hurling grenades into two churches in the eastern garrison town of Garissa before firing guns into the congregation.
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