A military official in neighboring Mauritania said the kidnappers are linked to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, but that could not immediately be confirmed and there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about sensitive security issues.

Algerian authorities would not immediately comment on the kidnapping.

The governments of Algeria, Mauritania and other countries in the region are struggling against AQIM, which sprang from an Algerian Muslim extremist movement and has spread throughout swaths of the sparsely populated Sahara Desert.

Many Western Saharan refugees fled from the mineral-rich former Spanish colony in northwestern Africa when Morocco occupied it after Spain withdrew in 1975, leaving a power vacuum. Some of those refugees have remained in Algerian camps close to the border with their former homeland.

The unidentified gunmen entered the Rabuni camp near Tindouf, Algeria, and seized the three foreign aid workers early Sunday, said two officials: Spanish Foreign Minister Trinidad Jimenez and Jose Miguel Suarez, a coordinator for the aid organization Friends of the Saharawi People in Spain. “We are going to deploy all of our diplomatic and consular capacity to ensure these aid workers return home,” Jimenez said.

Italy’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that one of the captives is an Italian working for the Italian Committee for the Development of Peoples, but urged the media to limit its reporting on the kidnapping.

Spanish media said one of the three captives was wounded, but provided no details about that.