Somali gunmen struck again inside Kenya, abducting two European aid workers yesterday afternoon from a sprawling refugee camp near the Kenya-Somalia border, officials said.
It is the fourth time in the past five weeks that heavily armed kidnappers believed to be from Somalia have successfully infiltrated Kenya.
Kenyan security services immediately said Thursday's attack was the work of al-Shabab, a ruthless Islamist insurgent group that has been terrorizing Somalia for years and has pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda.
"Unfortunately, these people and our own people don't look too different," said Eric Kiraithe, a Kenyan police spokesman, explaining how Somali militants could operate in Kenya.
"But we are pursuing them, and we should be able to stop this madness once and for all." According to Kenyan officials, around 1pm the gunmen attacked a truck carrying two female European aid workers of the private aid agency Doctors Without Borders.
The women were traveling through the Dadaab refugee camp, a vast complex in the middle of the desert that houses hundreds of thousands of Somalis who have fled conflict and famine in their country.
The gunmen shot and wounded the agency's Kenyan driver before speeding off toward the Somali border with the two women, Kenyan officials said.
Most aid agencies working in Dadaab insist that all aid workers travel with armed security, because there have been a number of kidnappings and carjackings in Dadaab in recent years.
However, the Doctors Without Borders team did not have armed guards. Doctors Without Borders says hiring armed guards conflicts with its humanitarian work and its policy of being independent and neutral.
According to one Doctors Without Borders official, the only place in the world the organization uses armed guards is in Somalia.
The Kenyan police said they were chasing the kidnappers through the desert with police jeeps and helicopters, and they suspected that the culprits were members of al-Shabab, which killed scores of civilians, many of them students, last week in a suicide bombing in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu.