MOGADISHU — Somali police launched an
investigation Sunday after 20 foreigners were discovered near territory
controlled by the
Al-Shabaab militant group claiming to be fishermen who had
been held hostage for years.
اضافة اعلان
Police spokesman
Sadik Dudishe said the men — 14 Iranians and six Pakistanis — were apprehended
for questioning after they wandered unexpectedly from a part of Galmudug state
under militant control.
“Some of these people were kidnapped by Al-Shabaab
in 2014, while others were abducted on the Harardhere coast, near Qosol-tire,
in southern Somalia in mid-2019,” Dudishe said in a statement.
“Four of them have physical injuries,” he said.
It is not clear how the men came to be released, and
police provided no further detail, citing an ongoing inquiry.
Local authorities in Hobyo, the coastal town where
the men appeared, said the foreigners were being held for questioning.
“We are still investigating these 20 men who were
detained today after coming from an Al-Shabaab controlled area,” Hobyo’s
commissioner Abdullahi Ahmed Ali told reporters.
“They have claimed to be fishermen,” he added.
Al-Shabaab, which controls swathes of rural Somalia,
has been trying to overthrow the central government for 15 years, funding its
insurgency through criminal activities including kidnapping and ransom.
Somalia has also been plagued by piracy for years,
though attacks on maritime vessels off the coast have fallen off sharply in
recent years since peaking at 176 in 2011.
Unconfirmed reports suggest the men could have been
abducted by pirates and passed on to Al-Shabaab, an affiliate of
Al-Qaeda,
which includes foreign fighters among its ranks.
In 2020, three Iranian fishermen believed to be the
last hostages held by Somali pirates were freed after five years of captivity.
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