Two die in attack on WFP office in southern Somalia

MOGADISHU, Aug. 17 (Xinhua) -- Two were killed and at least another was wounded overnight after unidentified gunmen attacked the offices of the UN World Food Programe (WFP) in the southern city of Wajib, an official and witnesses said Monday.

"The attackers tried to enter the compound forcibly but the guards confronted and killed two of them and wounded another," an aid worker in Wajib town, who requested anonymity, told Xinhua.

Most of the senior staff with the WFP and other humanitarian agencies have left southern and central Somalia after the upsurge in violence against aid workers in the region, mainly under the control of the Islamist insurgent movement of Al-Shabaab.

Leaders of the radical group, which recently banned the operations of three UN agencies in Somalia, denied involvement in the attack on WFP, an organization that provides most of the aid deliveries for Somalia's internally displaced people.

Meanwhile, Omar Ali Alasow, a senior aid worker with DBG-Somalia, a locally based organization, was shot dead overnight by unknown assailants as he sat outside the office of the organization in the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps on the outskirts of Mogadishu.

DBG is linked to the German aid agency, Diakonie Emergency Aid -- Bread for the World (BftW), and is involved in water trucking and emergency aid delivery for the thousands of IDPs families on the outskirts of Mogadishu.

Two of the DBG staffs were killed last year after the offices of the NGO on the outskirts of the Somali capital came under attack from masked men.

Several aid workers were killed or wounded while others were taken hostage in southern and central Somalia for the past two years and as violence against humanitarian agencies surged their work have been decreased.

The UN warns millions in Somalia risk starvation as prevailing insecurity prevent aid deliveries for those in need while rains failed in several parts of the war torn country.