MAKHACHKALA - A Dutch employee of the international medical aid group Doctors Without Borders was abducted in southern Russia, officials said Tuesday.

The Dutch citizen, Arjan Erkel, was seized by three gunmen in the suburbs of Makhachkala late Monday, said Abdul Musayev, spokesman for the Interior Ministry in the Russian republic of Dagestan, which borders on Chechnya.

A duty officer of the Federal Security Service in Dagestan said Erkel was abducted after leaving his translator's home.

Erkel's driver has been detained in connection with the kidnapping and his translator was being questioned as a witness, said Dagestan's first deputy prosecutor, Magomed Abdulkhalikov. He refused to say why the driver was detained.

The Interfax news agency said the fact that the driver was not hurt and was not tied up during the abduction raised investigators' suspicion that he was somehow involved.

Musayev of the Interior Ministry said that no ransom has been demanded, and that investigators worked through the night to search for clues to the disappearance.

Kate de Rivero, a spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders in Moscow, said the organization had not been contacted by Erkel's abductors.

Erkel, the head of the Russian mission of the Swiss branch of the aid group, had been based in Dagestan since the spring, De Rivero said. Work in the region focused on assisting refugees from the Chechnya conflict, she said.

De Rivero said Doctors was continuing its operations in Dagestan and Ingushetia, another region bordering Chechnya that has absorbed the bulk of refugees. The organization has both local and foreign employees in the regions.

Last month, Doctors joined the United Nations in suspending aid operations in Chechnya after Nina Davidovich, head of a Russian partner organization of the U.N., was kidnapped there.

Kidnapping for ransom is a widespread racket in the Caucasus Mountains region. Foreigners are often targets because of their high visibility and the belief that they have greater resources to pay higher ransoms.

Chechnya was swept by a wave of abductions after the first, 1994-96 war, in which separatists won de-facto independence, and the kidnapping epidemic was cited by Russian officials as one of the reasons for sending troops back into the region in the autumn of 1999. The Russian military presence in Chechnya has helped reduce the number of abductions, but not ended them.

Earlier this year, the Russian Interior Ministry said that some 700 people were being held for ransom in and around Chechnya. Kidnappers have treated hostages cruelly, keeping them in pits, forcing them to work as slaves, beating and sometimes killing them.

In January 2001, an American worker with Doctors Without Borders was abducted in the region by unidentified gunmen and held for 25 days.