Al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists in Syria have seized a priest and 20 other Christians in the latest abduction by militants in the war-torn country, the Franciscan Order says.
A statement from the order's Custody of the Holy Land in Jerusalem on Tuesday said parish priest Father Hanna Jallouf was seized on Sunday night in the village of Qunyeh, northwestern Syria.
It said that his abductors were "linked" to al-Qaeda affiliate the Al-Nusra Front, and added that following the incident an unspecified number of Franciscan nuns took refuge with the villagers.
Qunyeh is a village of several hundred people, some 8km from the border with Turkey.
Senior Franciscan official Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa said the 62-year-old priest was seized along with 20 villagers.
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"He has been kidnapped," he told AFP in Jerusalem, expressing deep concern over the fate of the priest, a Syrian who has worked in Qunyeh for 12 years after a posting in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
"They are accusing them of being collaborators" with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Pizzaballa said, insisting that this was not true.
"We don't know what to do. We don't know with whom to talk, we're totally unable to get in touch with anyone," added Pizzaballa, the guardian of the Catholic Church's sites in the Holy Land.
According to a source linked to the Franciscan Order in Aleppo, Al-Nusra rebels forced their way into the convent and "looted everything".
He said the rebels were "angry with Father Hanna because he refused to give them some of the olives harvested from trees on the convent's land".
The Franciscans, a religious order within the Catholic Church, have 19 people working across Syria, where the order has operated for 800 years.
