Aid Workers Taken Hostage From Boat Off Somalia Two Kenyans In Group, Along With Briton, Indian, Canadian

Gunmen stormed a boat moored off northern Somalia and kidnapped five aid workers from the United Nations and European Union, officials said Saturday.

U.N. officials were negotiating with Somali clan elders for their release.

Those taken hostage Friday included Briton Dennis Cassidy, according to his employer, the European Union. With him were two employees of the U.N. Children’s Fund, another from U.N. Habitat and one from the U.N. Office for Project Services, a U.N. source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The British Foreign Office said two Kenyans, one Indian and one Canadian were being held in addition to Cassidy. Their names were not released.

The five were taken at gunpoint from a boat moored off El Ayo, in the northeast corner of the self-declared independent Republic of Somaliland, the source said. The region declared its independence in 1991.

A European Union source, also speaking on anonymity, said the five were kidnapped in connection with a dispute over coal exports.

Aid workers often have been prime targets for dissatisfied Somali employees and the armed factions vying to control Somalia since a 1991 coup left the country without a central government.

On Friday, faction leaders in the southern Somalia port of Kismayo promised the United Nations that they would not attack aid workers delivering relief to nearly 230,000 people left homeless by the worst flooding in decades. Those factions are independent, however, of the ones in Somaliland.

Many countries have balked at becoming involved in U.N. aid missions to Africa since 18 U.S. Rangers were killed in Somalia in 1993. U.S. troops were drawn into factional fighting at the end of a successful mission to stop deaths from starvation, disease and civil war that killed 350,000 Somalis in 1991-92.

Ironically, aid workers had found Somaliland far safer than the south. At least eight U.N. agencies and 12 nongovernmental organizations had been working in Hargeisa, capital of the breakaway republic - the largest concentration of aid groups anywhere in Somalia.

The U.N. pulled all expatriate employees out of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, in February 1995 after U.N. peacekeepers failed to end clan fighting.

On Sept. 13, gunmen kidnapped the Somali head of the U.N. World Food Program in Mogadishu. He was released three days later.

In July, an American aid worker was kidnapped in central Somalia, but escaped unharmed the same day.