Red Cross team kidnapped in Mali

An Al-Qaeda-linked group in Mali has kidnapped a team of Red Cross workers who had been reported missing, the group known as the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) said on Tuesday. 

The members of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) team "are alive and in good health," a MUJAO official told Agence France-Presse in a telephone call.

MUJAO is one of the groups allied to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a group which occupied the north of Mali in 2012 before they were partly driven from the region by a French-led military intervention in January 2013. AQIM, which has launched attacks in north and west Africa, was originally formed to establish an Islamic state in Algeria.

"Thanks to God we seized a 4X4 (vehicle) of the enemies of Islam with their accomplices," MUJAO official Yoro Abdoulsalam said, confirming it was the ICRC team reported missing in recent days. He gave no other details.

On Monday, the ICRC confirmed that the organization had lost contact with one of its vehicles in northern Mali on Saturday. It said four staff and a veterinary assistant were in the vehicle. All five individuals are Malian citizens.

"We are extremely worried about the fate of our colleagues," Christoph Luedi, head of the ICRC delegation in Mali, said in a statement. "We're doing everything we can to locate them as quickly as possible." 

ICRC operations in Mali range from visiting people detained during the country's conflict to providing aid to the hundreds of thousands of people who were driven from their homes by fighting.

Mali descended into chaos when Tuareg rebels and Islamist groups took over the north after a military coup in March 2012 far to the south in the capital Bamako.

The humanitarian crisis sparked by the conflict came on top of years of drought in the Sahel region that have left 800,000 Malians relying on food aid. 

The rebels started an advance on Bamako that led to a military intervention by former colonial power France in January 2013. 

French troops pushed the Al-Qaeda-linked militants out of northern towns early last year and have kept up operations against residual groups of insurgents. 

France is winding down its force from a peak of around 5,000 soldiers but is to keep 1,000 troops in Mali beyond the spring. 

The U.N. peacekeepers took over security in July last year from a pan-African military mission that had been supporting the French troops. 

The U.N. mission played a key security role in presidential polls last year which saw former the premier, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, become the country's first democratically elected leader since the 2012 coup. 

Al Jazeera and Agence France-Presse