Kenya Police: Italian National Kidnapped By Gunmen

Local Editor

Gunmen have kidnapped an Italian volunteer along Kenya’s coast and wounded several people, police said Wednesday.

Five people were wounded by the attackers, who shot indiscriminately at around 8 p.m. Tuesday in the Chakama trading center in the county of Kilifi, said the country’s police chief, Joseph Boinnet.

Boinnet identified the volunteer as a 23-year-old Italian woman. The motive for the attack isn’t clear and the identity of the attackers is not yet known, he said.

Somali-based militants have been blamed in the past for a spate of kidnappings of foreigners along Kenya’s coast. Kenya said it was prompted to send troops to Somalia in 2011 to fight al-Shabab militants after the kidnappings of four foreigners.

One of the foreigners, a cancer-stricken quadriplegic Frenchwoman kidnapped off a Kenyan resort island, died in captivity in Somalia. Somali gunmen snatched Marie Dedieu in the middle of the night from her resort island home near Lamu on Oct. 1, 2011. The 66-year-old, wheelchair-bound woman suffered from cancer and required special medications several times a day, medicine her captors did not take with them.

Faced with a crashing tourism industry following the kidnappings, Kenya deployed troops to Somalia later in October to fight the militants. Al-Shabab has since carried out numerous attacks in Kenya, saying it is vengeance for the country’s troop presence in Somalia.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team