Dhaka  - Unidentified armed men abducted two rubber- plantation employees Sunday in Bangladesh's south-eastern hilly region - from where the authorities have started pulling out troops 12 years after a supposed peace deal to end a bloody ethnic conflict.

Police said that a gang of armed men in combat dress kidnapped the workers from a privately-run rubber plantations in Naikhyongchhari sub-district, some 320 kilometres south-east of capital Dhaka.

Relatives of the victims reported to local police that the kidnappers contacted them by cell phone asking for a huge ransom for the pair's release, they said.

"The search is on to rescue the employees from the possible hideouts of the kidnappers," Obaidul Haque, Naikhyongchhari police chief, said.

This was the first case of abduction since the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed on July 9 announced her decision to pull out the troops from temporary security bases in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region - battered by over two decades of guerilla warfare for self-rule by the 11 ethnic minority groups.

The insurgency had supposedly been buried with the signing of a 1997 landmark peace deal between the government and Parbatya Chattagram Jana Sanghati Samiti, a political platform of the minority groups.

In line with the treaty, the government decided to pull the temporary army bases from the region that accounted for nearly one- tenths of the country's total land area. (dpa)