Somalia: Kidnappers offer to sell dead French woman’s body

The kidnappers of a disabled French woman, who died in Somalia, have tried to sell her dead body.

Marie Dedieu, 66, who suffered from poor health, was kidnapped from a Kenyan island resort and taken to nearby Somalia, where she was likely refused her daily medication for cancer and heart problems, BBC News reports.

The French Foreign Ministry reportedly sent medicine to Somalia, but it was refused by her kidnappers.

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France's defense minister said Dedieu's kidnappers were now trying to sell her body back to France.

"You have to know that the hostage takers are even looking to sell her body… It is completely disgusting," Gerard Longuet, the French defense minister, said on i-Tele TV, Reuters reports.

"Letting her get blood poisoning, which is what she probably died of, and then trying to sell her body [shows] that these people only deserve contempt," Longuet added.

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Dedieu had been held in Somalia since October 1.

She was taken from her rented home on Manda island, just across a narrow channel from the popular tourist village of Shela on Lamu island. Dedieu had lived part of the year in Kenya since the 1990s.

Last week, two Spanish aid workers working for the international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) were seized at gunpoint inside Dadaab, Kenya's largest refugee camp.