Militants kidnap six oil company employees

DERA ISMAIL KHAN: Six people working for a Polish oil and gas surveying company have been kidnapped, military sources said.

The six Geofizyka Krakow workers were snatched from their vehicles on Saturday afternoon on a road near the village of Drazinda, about 80km from the city of Dera Ismail Khan, two officials with security forces in the area said.

One of the officials provided Reuters news agency with the names and national identity card numbers of the workers. "Six Pakistani workers were accompanied by seven guards of tribal police. Around five to six people interrupted their convoy and took away all six Polish company workers and three tribal policemen," a senior police official in the region told AFP.

"Later, they freed the tribal policemen and took the oil workers with them, towards South Waziristan tribal belt," he said. A senior government official in the region said the authorities had launched a search operation for the oil workers. Geofizyka Krakow, a subsidiary of Poland’s state-run gas firm PGNiG, could not be immediately reached for comment.

On its website, the PGNiG local unit said it had gone into liquidation in August 2016. "They were sub-contractors providing works for Geofizyka Krakow, a company which is now in liquidation. They were not Polish," a PGNiG spokesman said.

He declined to give any more details. A Polish foreign ministry spokeswoman tweeted that there were no Polish citizens in the group and that the Polish embassy in Islamabad is monitoring the situation. No militant group has claimed responsibility for the kidnappings.