Aid workers abducted in Kenya

• The aid workers are with the Norwegian Refugee Council
• Their driver, a Kenyan, was killed, police say
• The abductors get away with a refugee council vehicle
• Kenya has blamed previous abductions on the militant Al-Shabaab group

Nairobi, Kenya (CNN) -- Five aid workers -- four Europeans and a Kenyan -- were kidnapped from Kenya's vast Dadaab refugee complex near the Somali border, police said Friday.

Their Kenyan driver was killed, said Philip Ndolo of the Kenyan police.

The abductors got away with a vehicle of the Norwegian Refugee Council, a global humanitarian agency. The vehicle's tracking device indicated that it was still within Kenyan territory.

The aid agency said only that a convoy "was involved in an incident" in Dadaab and that Secretary General Elisabeth Rasmusson and Country Director Hassan Khaire were at the camp but neither was in the convoy.

"We are now in the process of acquiring more information about what has happened," the aid agency said.

The battle against al-Shabaab in Somalia

Police have launched a search in the area. They would not say whether the kidnappers were from Al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked group that is fighting to impose Islamic law in Somalia and controls large parts of the troubled nation.

Kenya has blamed previous abductions of tourists and aid workers on Al-Shabaab.

In September, armed bandits broke into a beachfront cottage where Britons Judith and David Tebbutt, both in their 50s, were staying. David Tebbutt was shot dead while trying to resist the attack. His wife was grabbed and spirited away on a speedboat. She was released months later in Somalia after her family paid a ransom.

In October, pirates made another cross-border raid, this time snatching a French woman in her 60s, who used a wheelchair and was believed to be in bad health, from a holiday home on Manda Island, where she lived part of the year. She later died, likely because of the kidnappers' refusal to give her medicine, according to the French Foreign Ministry.

Also in October, gunmen abducted two Spanish workers with the medical charity Doctors Without Borders from Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp, which houses nearly 500,000 people about 50 miles west of the Somali border.

Journalist Lillian Leposo contributed to this report.