Doctors' group pulls staff from Somalia

Doctors Without Borders has pulled all of its international staff out of Somalia after three of its aid workers were killed in a land mine explosion earlier this week, the group said Friday.

The international aid group, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, said in a statement it was "deeply shocked by the murder of its team" in an attack that it called "probably premeditated." It evacuated its 87 foreign employees this week.

Three staff members of MSF-Holland were killed and one wounded when their vehicle hit a land mine Monday on a road between the international staff members' home and the hospital where they worked in the southern Somali town of Kismayo, said Malika Saim at the group's headquarters in Paris.

Those killed were a Kenyan surgeon, a French logistics expert and a Somali driver, she said. Saim said the road was one the aid workers took almost daily, and that the car was clearly marked as belonging to MSF, suggesting the group had been targeted.

MSF said it was unclear whether the mine was detonated by remote control, who was behind the attack or whether an investigation was under way.

"Out of respect for the victims and because of the opaque circumstances around the attack," the group decided to evacuate international staff who had been working on 14 projects in Somalia, the group said.

Some 800 Somali employees are still providing medical services in the country.

But Christophe Fournier, head of the international board of MSF, warned in the statement that the departure of the foreign employees would "deeply affect" those services.

He called the attack "a serious violation of the humanitarian action that our colleagues were involved in."

The group noted that the attack came as the country was already in a critical state, facing mounting violence that is increasing the need for urgent medical care.

Somalia has not had a functioning government since clan-based warlords toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and then turned on each other, sinking the poverty-stricken nation of 7 million people into chaos.

Its weak transitional government, backed by Ethiopian troops, is struggling to quash an Islamic insurgency.

MSF has been in the country for more than 16 years.