A local aid worker for the United Nations health agency was severely wounded Sunday in the southern town of Dinsor by unknown gunmen, witnesses said.
Ismael Moalin Ahmed, head of the World Health Organization's Polio Vaccination Campaign in Dinsor town, was kidnapped before being shot seven times and left for dead.
"They stopped his car on the way between Dinsor and Baidoa, where he was to report to his senior, asking him to turn from the road into the jungle where they shot him seven times and left him, thinking he was dead," an aid worker in Dinsor who sought for anonymity told Xinhua.
He is now in a very critical condition in hospital in Dinsor town in Bay region, 250 km southwest of the capital Mogadishu.
Ahmed is the last of dozens of local and international aid workers targeted in Somalia this year. Nearly local and foreign aid workers are being held hostage by a militia group in south Somalia where most of the violence against aid workers occurs.
Last month, the head of UN Development Program Somalia office was shot dead by unknown gunmen as he left a mosque in south Mogadishu.
All the major insurgent groups denied responsibility for the killing and kidnapping of aid workers in Somalia but a relatively unknown group said it targeted aid workers who they accuse of aiding Somali government troops and Ethiopian forces.
Most of international aid agencies have scaled down their activities in Somalia and withdrawn all foreign aid workers since the increase in the violence against them.
Local and international aid agencies provide assistance to nearly a million internally displaced people encamped on the outskirts of the restive Somali capital Mogadishu. They fled the ongoing violence between insurgent groups and Somali government forces backed by Ethiopian troops.
Source:Xinhua
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