AN ARMED GANG has abducted an Italian volunteer from a village in southeast Kenya, shooting and wounding five residents in the raid, police say.

“The attackers fired indiscriminately at residents” before kidnapping the 23-year-old charity worker during the attack after dark on Tuesday evening at Chakama, a small village in the coastal Kilifi county, police said in a statement.

Three children were among those injured, with one, a 10-year-old boy, shot in the eye, according to police.

“Neither the reasons for the attack nor the identity of the attackers have been established,” police said.

The wounded have been taken to hospital and police “deployed to track down the criminals”.

Kidnappings of foreigners are rare in Kenya, but have a damaging effect on the country’s crucial tourist economy.

A spate of abductions on the coast in 2011 saw a British man shot dead and his wife kidnapped from a resort island, while weeks later a French woman was abducted from her home on the Lamu archipelago.

Soon afterwards jihadist gunmen from the Shabaab militant group abducted two Spanish aid workers from the Dadaab refugee camp close to the Somali border.

- © AFP 2018