Darfur, July 04: Armed men have abducted two foreign aid workers in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, UN officials say.
The two women — one Irish and one Ugandan — work for the Irish aid group Goal and were abducted from their compound in the northern town of Kutum on Friday evening along with a Sudanese guard who was later released, officials said.
John O’Shea, the chief executive of Goal, named the two women as Hilda Kawuki, 42, from Uganda and Sharon Commins, 32, from Ireland.
“We don’t know who took them. There are so many splinter groups in the area you’d only be guessing,” O’Shea told Reuters.
“The local police force are in charge of trying to track them down. We have never had a kidnapping before. We are just hoping and praying that we can get them back.”
Ethnic minority fighters on one hand and the Arab-dominated government and its allies on the other have been fighting in the western Sudanese region of Darfur since 2003.
The incident marks the third kidnapping of foreign aid workers in Darfur since March, when armed men seized four members of the Doctors Without Borders medical aid group. They were freed a few days later.
In April, a French national and a Canadian aid worker were seized in southern Darfur and released three weeks later.
The UN says the fighting has killed up to 300,000 people and displaced an estimated 2.7 million, but Khartoum disputes the figures, saying that only 10,000 people have died in the conflict.
—–Agencies