Somali gunmen have kidnapped two Western aid workers from a town near the Ethiopian border, residents said Tuesday.

"We are not aware of their nationalities, but they are a white man and a white woman," Ali Isse Osman, a resident in the town of Gura'el, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Osman said that the pair were abducted from the border town of Las Anod and then brought to Gura'el, 530 kilometres north of Mogadishu.

Criminal gangs looking for ransom and Islamic insurgents battling Somalia's transitional federal government often target foreigners for abduction.

Police in the breakaway Somali region of Puntland on Monday stormed the hideout of a gang of kidnappers to free a German man and his wife.