At least 2 doctors from Cuba were travelling on a car in northern Kenya when gunmen shot dead two police officers who were guarding the medics, and forced the foreigners onto their car, then sped away.
The officers, one from the Administration Police and the other from Kenya Police, had picked up the health workers from their houses in a Mandera County government vehicle. As they were heading to the station where the Cuban doctors work, armed assailants in a saloon car and a Toyota Probox first blocked the vehicle ferrying the medics to work.
According to witnesses, they then alighted and opened fire on the police officers, killing the AP instantly.
The violent incident Friday, which took place just miles from the Kenyan Capital, was not unique. In July 2009 Somali gunmen kidnapped three foreign aid workers in a raid on a Kenyan border town, then went back over the porous border into the Horn of Africa nation, rebels and residents said.
The Cuban doctors whereabouts are unknown.
One of the officers is alleged to have managed to escape in the attack that happened right in the middle of the northern-Kenya town that lies near the Somalia border.
The gunmen then bundled the two health workers into their cars and drove off and reports indicate they have crossed the border into Somalia.
Doctors Landy Rodriguez (a surgeon) and Herera Correa (general practitioner) had settled in well at the Mandera Referral Hospital where they had been working in the past year.
Mandera town is about a kilometer away from the main Kenya- Somalia border.