Security guards at Save The Children put up no resistance and no shots were exchanged.
The consultant has dual British and Zimbabwean nationality, according to the same humanitarian sources.
“We heard similar reports, we are investigating,” said a British diplomat contacted by AFP.

Clashes later broke out in Adado when fighters of the Sufi sect Ahlu Sunna, who arrived in dozens of vehicles mounted with weapons, attacked and captured the town from local militia that had been controlling it, witnesses said. There had been reports Ahlu Sunna fighters had been preparing the attack and the fighting had nothing to do with the overnight abduction of the British security consultant.

“We have been attacked and I–šÃ„ôm at war with militants..,” said Mohamed Aden Ticey, the self-proclaimed president of Himan and Heeb region whose capital is Adado.
“There was heavy fighting in Adado this morning and the Sufi group militants took control of the city,” said local elder Mohamed Hassan Abdallah. “They are now in full control.”

Abdi Ali, another Adado resident said: “We were not expecting that there could be fighting in the town. Everybody found the town in chaos this morning under the sound of machine-gun fire and anti-aircraft weapons.”

Other elders said the Al Qaeda-inspired Shebab insurgents were in turn preparing to attack the Ahlu Sunna gunmen whom they have previously fought in other regions.
“We are getting information that Shebab fighters are preparing an attack against the Sufi militants who took control of Adado and there is tension all over the region,” said Muhidin Isak, another elder.
The Himan and Heeb region is relatively calm but borders an area controlled by Shebab Islamists to the south while Somali pirates operate to the east.

A British couple, Paul and Rachel Chandler, have been held hostage for almost a year in this part of Somalia after their yacht was captured in the Indian Ocean, off the Seychelles.
Somalia has not had a central authority since plunging into a civil war with the 1991 ouster of former president Mohamed Siad Barre and has since been largely governed by rival armed groups.
Islamist militants have fought a three-year insurgency to topple Somalia’s fragile interim government, which they say is a puppet of the West, and want to impose a strict version of sharia law on the country.

The chaos on land has allowed piracy to flourish in the Gulf of Aden, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes linking Europe with Africa and Asia.

Mohamed Ali, a local administrator, told Reuters the gunmen had taken the hostages close to the district of Elbur, a known al Shabaab stronghold. “The kidnappers reached Xiin Dhere village which is controlled by al Shabaab,” he said.
Kidnapping is a lucrative business for Somali criminals, notably for pirates operating off the shores of the lawless nation, who typically treat their captives well, seeing them as an investment on which they expect to earn a ransom.
But the capture of foreign nationals has become relatively rare across much of the country because the region has become very dangerous for foreign aid workers.