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Aid group mulls pulling out of Somalia after kidnap
Written by: Frank Nyakairu
NAIROBI - Action Against Hunger, an international aid organisation, said on Wednesday it is considering pulling out of Somalia after four of its aid workers, kidnapped in November, were released. The aid workers - two French, a Bulgarian and a Belgian - and two Kenyan pilots were released on Tuesday and flown to Nairobi. "In the coming days we are going to decide if we want to continue working in Somalia or not," said Lucile Grosjean, a spokeswoman for Action Against Hunger. Some 3.2 million Somalis require humanitarian aid, the United Nations (U.N.) says. Action Against Hunger has 14 foreign and 220 local employees in Somalia according to its website. After the aid workers were kidnapped last year, Action Against Hunger shut down most of its operations in Somalia, said spokeswoman Elise Rodriguez. "We are not sure we will be starting any new programmes there," she added. Aid workers in Somalia have been the targets of assassinations and kidnappings during a two-year insurgency led by Islamist militants against the government and foreign backers. But captives are rarely harmed and are usually set free once a ransom is paid. "I understand $3 million in ransom was paid to release the six aid workers kidnapped from our region," local elder Farah Hussein said by phone from Gurael in central Somalia on Tuesday. The French foreign ministry and Action Against Hunger denied paying any ransom. The father of one of the Kenyan pilots echoed the denial. Grosjean said the captives "are all in good health but still undergoing medical tests to ensure that they are perfectly fine." An estimated 245,000 people have fled Mogadishu since May 7, when fighting erupted between government troops and al Shabaab militants who control much of southern Somalia and parts of the capital, the U.N. refugee agency said. Gunmen from the al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab group looted two U.N. compounds last month after saying they would expel three U.N. agencies operating in the country. NEW LOW POINT U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Wednesday that Somalia's humanitarian crisis had reached a "new low point". "A combination of intensified fighting between governments forces and insurgents, a deepening drought and country-wide economic crisis has put nearly half of the population or 3.2 million Somalis in need of humanitarian assistance," an OCHA spokeswoman told journalists in Geneva. Nearly one in seven or 1.3 million Somalis are internally displaced, including more than 200,000 since May, she added. A drought is spreading to the northern regions of the country and endangering the livelihoods of more than 700,000 pastoralists, she said. "One is six children under the age of five is acutely malnourished, and the number continues to increase," the spokeswoman said. Shipping aid to Somalia is costly as 95 percent of all aid arrives by sea where piracy is rampant, requiring the delivery ships to pay for military naval escorts. (Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva)
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