GAZA, Oct 12: Masked Palestinian gunmen kidnapped a US and a British journalist in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday in the latest sign of lawlessness in the coastal territory after Israel’s pullout last month.

The reporter and photographer working for Knight Ridder newspapers were seized by assailants who stopped their car near the town of Khan Younis and took them away at gunpoint, their Palestinian translator, Ziad Abu Mustafa, told Reuters.

Security forces have mounted a search for them, Palestinian Interior Ministry spokesman Tawfiq Abu Khoussa said.

Militant sources said the gunmen belonged to a breakaway group from President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah group, but their motive was not immediately known.

Mustafa said the journalists, on assignment in Gaza, were Dion Nissenbaum — an American who recently became Knight Ridder’s Jerusalem correspondent — and a British photographer the translator knew only by the first name Adam.

“A car followed our vehicle for three or four minutes and then stopped us. Six gunmen pointed their weapons and said, ‘We want the foreigners’,” Mustafa said.

He was ordered to stay behind while the captives were taken toward the southern Gaza town of Rafah.

A number of foreign journalists and aid workers have been abducted in the Gaza Strip in recent months by militants, mostly by gunmen linked to Fatah, pressing complaints and demands about jobs and corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

All have been released unharmed, usually within hours.—Reuters