Troops have freed a British employee of a Canadian-based oil company who was abducted by his bodyguards in Somalia on Wednesday.

The worker, who had been conducting a survey south of the port city of Bossaso for Africa Oil Corp., was unharmed in the incident, said Farah Abdi Hussein, an official with Somalia's Energy and Minerals Ministry.

But one of the abductors was killed and another was wounded in the process of freeing the man, Hussein said.

He confirmed the abducted man was a British citizen, not Pakistani, as earlier reported in some media.

Vancouver-based Africa Oil has not commented on the abduction.

Foreigners are often targeted for ransoms in Somalia and off its coast, where pirates are holding several ships, including a Ukrainian vessel carrying 33 tanks and other heavy weapons.

The hostages are usually freed unharmed after a few days or weeks in exchange for ransom payments.

On Tuesday, the UN Security Council passed a resolution urging countries with naval vessels deployed around the Horn of Africa to take whatever steps are necessary to stamp out piracy off the 3,000-kilometre coastline of Somalia.

Somalia, a country of about eight million people, has not had a functioning government since warlords overthrew a dictator in 1991 and then turned on each other.

Islamic militants with ties to al-Qaeda have been battling the shaky transitional government and its Ethiopian allies since their combined forces pushed the Islamists from the capital in December 2006.

With files from the Associated Press and Reuters