Red Cross says Tunisian employee kidnapped in Yemen

SANAA: Unidentified assailants on Tuesday kidnapped two Red Cross employees in the Yemeni capital, releasing one but keeping the other, a Tunisian female staffer, an ICRC spokeswoman said.

"One, a Yemeni, was released unharmed a few hours later. The second, a Tunisian colleague, a woman, is still being held," said International Committee of the Red Cross spokeswoman Rima Kamal.

She said the ICRC had suspended all movements of its staff in Yemen following the kidnapping and called for the immediate release of the Tunisian staff member.

"We don't know who has done this and why," Kamal told AFP.

"We appeal to those responsible to release our colleague as soon as possible," she added.

According to Kamal the pair were on their way to work in Sanaa when they were abducted.

Iran-backed Shiite Huthi rebels seized Sanaa last year and then advanced south to second city Aden, forcing President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and his government to flee to Saudi Arabia.

Since March Saudi Arabia has led an air campaign against the rebels to restore the authority of Hadi, and has helped loyalists capture back Aden where Hadi has set up temporarily his government.

In September, two ICRC employees were killed by gunfire north of Sanaa and later that month two Yemeni volunteers with the Red Crescent and a group of civilians were killed in a Saudi-led air strike.

A number of foreigners have been taken hostage in the impoverished Arabian Peninsula country in the past 15 years, mostly by tribesmen as bargaining chips in negotiations with the government.

Almost all have been freed unharmed.

But in December last year, US journalist Luke Somers and South African teacher Pierre Korkie died during a failed attempt by US commandos to rescue them from an Al-Qaeda hideout in southeastern Yemen.

And in August Frenchwoman Isabelle Prime, freed after nearly six months of captivity in Yemen, arrived in Paris to an emotional reunion with her family.

The 30-year-old, who worked as a consultant on a World Bank-funded project in Yemen, had been abducted in February, also in Sanaa, along with her Yemeni translator Sherine Makkaoui.

Makkaoui was freed in March.