Two foreign aid workers with Doctors Without Borders in quake-hit Haiti were kidnapped and held for nearly a week before being freed today, the international medical charity said.
"Two of my colleagues, two women, were abducted last Friday. They were released early this morning ... they are in good health and in good shape," a spokesman in Haiti for Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said.
Citing privacy considerations, he declined to give details of their identities or nationalities or of the circumstances of the kidnapping, which occurred in the capital Port-au-Prince.
"It is not our policy to pay any ransoms," he said. He declined to say whether a ransom had been asked for in this case, or who the kidnappers were.
The incident was the first known kidnapping of foreign nationals in Haiti since the catastrophic earthquake on January 12th that wrecked Port-au-Prince and surrounding towns.
Haiti's president has said up to 300,000 people may have been killed by the earthquake, and more than a million people were left homeless, most of them poor.
Several thousand convicted prisoners have escaped from quake-damaged jails, and most of them are still at large.
The spokesman said Doctors Without Borders would review its operating procedures in Haiti following the kidnapping, but was committed to continuing to help the country's quake survivors recover from the disaster.
Reuters