KHARTOUM: Sudan said it had asked tribal elders to help free a Red Cross aid worker kidnapped in Darfur.

Armed men snatched Gauthier Lefevre last week in West Darfur, the fifth abduction of foreign workers since the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan Al Bashir for war crimes in March.

“We are working among the notable people in the area to send out the message that the ICRC (the International Committee of the Red Cross) should be rewarded not punished in this way,” said Sudan’s state minister for humanitarian affairs Abdel Baqi Al Jailani.

“We want them (the kidnappers) to know they have picked the wrong person. The ICRC never pays any ransom ... Our position is unchanged. No ransom should be provided.”

$1m ransom

A high-level security source said the abductors had asked for a $1m ransom for Lefevre, a dual French-British national working in Sudan on his French passport.

Jailani said he had reports the kidnappers had asked for ¤3m ($4.4m). “These are bandits who are moving without any aim except to make money,” he added.

Lefevre was captured just days after the release of two female staff from Irish aid agency Goal who endured more than 100 days in a mountain-top prison in Darfur.

Sudanese authorities said they negotiated through tribal leaders to end the Goal abduction.

A tribal leader said he was told the Goal kidnappers had been paid money to release them, a charge Sudan denies.

Aid workers in Darfur say they have felt increasingly under siege since the kidnappings started and have cut down on trips and moved some foreign staff to Darfur’s main towns.

Two civilians from the UN/African Union peacekeeping force, abducted from their compound in the west Darfur town of Zalingei at the end of August, remain in captivity.

Fighting surged in the remote western territory in 2003 after mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms against Sudan’s government, accusing it of neglecting the region.