MANILA, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Three international aid workers, including two foreigners, was kidnapped Thursday morning by unidentified gunmen in the restive southern Philippines, officials said.

The team from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), led by Swiss Andreas Notter, were kidnapped in a car on their way to the Jolo airport in Sulu Province, said Estefani Cacho, a spokesperson for the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Notter is the head of ICRC office in Zamboanga City.

The aid workers were supposed to fly back to Zamboanga from Sulu.

The other two members kidnapped are Italian Eugenio Vagni and Filipino Jean Iacaba.

As a neutral organization, they had declined armed escorts in spite of the insurgency in the region, according to the spokesperson.

The ICRC team arrived in Sulu on Tuesday for humanitarian work for prisoners there.

"They have been carrying out a water and sanitation project to improve the conditions of detainees in the Sulu provincial jail," said Roland Bigler, ICRC Communication Delegate in the Philippines.

"They were taken a few hundred meters away from the gate of the prison," he added.

The kidnappers used the ICRC team's vehicle for their getaway, according to Nelson Allaga, chief of Western Mindanao Command of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. The vehicle has been recovered by pursuing members of the military.

"The troops are in hot pursuit and the latest (report) is they have already recovered the vehicle," said the commander.

"They (the gunmen and the kidnapped) are now traveling on foot," Allaga said.

No organization has claimed responsibility for the incident. But the Jolo Island is known as a stronghold of the al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf, a 380-member group blamed for a series of kidnappings and terror attacks in the Southeast Asian country, including the bombing of a ferry near Manila Bay in 2004 that killed more than 100 people.
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