Somali gunmen kidnap two aid workers

---

MOGADISHU, Dec 26 (Agencies): Gunmen in northern Somalia kidnapped two foreign women working for the aid group Doctors Without Borders on Wednesday, officials and a witness said".Two foreign aid workers were kidnapped," said Abdirahman Mohamed Bangah, the information minister in the Puntland region. "We are collecting more information."
The victims are employees of the international group Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, said Sahro Sheik Muse, who lives near the group's building in Puntland and said she saw the incident. She said one woman was Spanish and the other was from Argentina.
"Six gunmen armed with AK-47s blocked a minibus carrying the female aid workers, then they impounded their mobile phones and ordered the driver and a translator to go away," Muse told The Associated Press by telephone.
Puntland is associated with coastal piracy and known as a staging post for human traffickers running boats into Yemen. A French journalist was kidnapped in the same region on Dec. 16, but he was released after eight days. Those kidnappers had demanded about $70,000 in ransom, but police said it was not paid.
The region's deputy governor, Yusuf Mumin Bidde, confirmed the latest kidnappings but had no further information. A spokeswoman for Medecins San Frontieres in Nairobi, Kenya, said she could not confirm the abductions. Calls to the Spanish Embassy were not immediately returned.
The region is about 930 miles north of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, which is at the center of an Islamic insurgency that has killed thousands of people this year. The United Nations says Somalia is facing Africa's worst humanitarian crisis.