Five workers with the French medical charity MSF have been kidnapped in Cameroon’s Far North, a region troubled by jihadist insurgents, MSF and a senior local official told AFP.

Armed men in Fotokol, near the border with Nigeria, entered a building used by MSF and “five members of our team were taken away,” the charity said in an email.

The five comprise three aid workers with Chadian, Senegalese and French-Ivorian nationalities, and two Cameroonian security guards, a local administrative official said.

The Far North is a tongue of land that lies between Nigeria to the west and Chad to the east.

It touches on the marshlands of the Lake Chad region, where Boko Haram jihadists and militants from the rival Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) are notorious.

But the local official cautioned that there was “no evidence” yet “to connect this incident to (jihadist) attacks.”

“We don’t know if it was a simple robbery that went wrong. A safe was opened,” he said, adding that the army had launched a search operation.

© Agence France-Presse