MOGADISHU, somalia —Gunmen kidnapped an American man in the northern Somali town of Galkayo on Saturday, officials said, the same day an airstrike killed a senior insurgent leader with ties to al-Qaeda in another part of the country.
The gunmen surrounded the man’s car shortly after he left the airport, said policeman Abdi Hassan Nur, who witnessed the incident. He said the American was forced into another vehicle.
Galkayo is on the border between the semiautonomous northern region of Puntland and a region known as Galmudug. It is ruled by forces friendly to the U.N.-backed Somali government.
A staff member at the Embassy Hotel, where the man was staying, said the American had gone to the airport to drop off an Indian colleague. The hotel said the man had both American and German citizenship.
In a separate incident in the south of the country outside the capital of Mogadishu, a British-Lebanese commander of the al-Shabab militant group was killed along with two others when a missile struck the car they were traveling in, al-Shabab spokesman Sheik Ali Rage said. Rage identified the British-Lebanese commander as Bilal-Berjawi.
