Red Cross says 3 workers kidnapped in Yemen

The International Committee of the Red Cross says three of its workers have been kidnapped in the southern Yemeni province of Abyan.
Dibeh Fakhr, a spokeswoman for the Geneva-based ICRC, says two international staff and a locally hired employee were taken in the vicinity of Jaar earlier today.
She says the three are alive and "hopefully unharmed," and the organisation is negotiating for their release. She says she assumes the kidnappers might be the same group involved in a similar incident last week.
But she declined to give more information, saying it could endanger the negotiations and put lives at risk.

Yemen's president warned last week that the al-Qaida branch in the country was expanding and using assassinations and abductions of foreigners as a way to challenge the central authority.