Aid worker's wife `sorry' for attacker

The wife of murdered aid worker Michael Pollard is to fly home from Hungary today. Jo Pollard, of Baildon, near Bradford, West Yorkshire, has been recovering in Nyiregyhaza hospital after a savage roadside attack last week in which her 62-year-old husband Michael, a church pastor, was beaten to death.

Concern was growing last night for two British aid workers kidnapped four days ago in the breakaway Russian province of Chechnya. The Foreign Office said there had been no contact from the armed gang which seized Jon James and his girlfriend, Camilla Carr, last Wednesday.

Survival guide for aid workers

A British aid worker and his French colleague taken hostage in Chechnya 26 days ago have been released, the Foreign Office said last night, writes Helen Noxicka.

Aid workers killed

More massacres in Burundi

Mogadishu (AFP) - The Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed has vastly extended his power base with the capture of Baidoa at the weekend, and observers predicted yesterday he would move on to the southern port city of Kismayo, raising the prospect of renewed civil war.

From Ms Nikkie du Preez

Dr James Thompson, senior lecturer in psychology at University College London Medical School, says aid workers can suffer disillusionment when they arrive at the scene and readjustment problems when they come home. As co-director of the Traumatic Stress Clinic at the Middlesex Hospital, he has treated aid workers and journalists who have been in war zones.

The closure of four hostels in Lewisham could leave battered women with nowhere suitable to live, say refuge workers in the borough. Lewisham withdrew funding after a dispute over policy in which aid workers locked-out management.

(First Edition)

Khmer Rouge rebels abducted an American woman, Melissa Himes, 25, of the relief organisation Food for the Hungry International, and have held her hostage for three days while demanding that the aid group digs them wells, its director said yesterday, AFP reports from Phnom Penh.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said yesterday that Alfred Petters, an American aid worker kidnapped in Mogadishu, was in good health and it was hoped he would be freed soon, AP reports from Geneva.