There are fears that a Franciscan priest who went missing at the weekend in Syria may have been abducted by allies of Al Qaeda. The Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, with which Father Dhiya Aziz is affiliated, said it lost contact with him on Saturday when he was taken away for questioning in Yacoubieh, in the northwestern province of Idlib. A regional spokesman for the Franciscan Order in Jerusalem told a news agency that militants from an unknown armed brigade, "perhaps connected with Al-Nusra", took him away for what they said would be a brief interview with the area's emir or leader. "From that moment we do not have any more news and we are unable to trace his whereabouts at the present moment," the spokesman told AFP. . "We are doing everything possible to locate the place of his detention and secure his release." Al-Nusra is a long-time affiliate of Al Qaeda, which claimed responsibility for a series of terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 and the 7/7 bombings that killed 52 people in London ten years ago today. AFP said the Franciscans' account was corroborated by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group monitoring the war in Syria. SOHR's director, Rami Abdel Rahman said "the local Al-Nusra 'emir,' an Egyptian, summoned Fr Aziz for consultations, but he never returned home." The Assyrian Observatory for Human Rights, another monitoring group, said on Facebook that the 41-year-old priest was taken from the Friary of the Immaculate Conception, where he was living in the predominantly Christian village of Yacoubieh. The village is in Idlib, most of which is under the control of Al-Nusra and its allies since it launched a large-scale operation earlier this year to expel the Assad regime. The Franciscan spokesman said Fr Aziz was born at Mosul, Iraq, where he studied at the medical institute before joining the order. After taking religious vows in 2002, he was sent to Egypt. In 2010 he was sent to Amman before transferring to Syria. Christians made up some 5% of Syria's population before the war, but many have fled during the past four years of bloodshed, fearing in particular the rise of jihadist groups such as Al-Nursa. Several Christian religious figures have been kidnapped since civil war engulfed Syria in 2011. Among them are two senior clerics from the northern city of Aleppo, Archbishop Gregorius Yohanna Ibrahim of the Syriac Orthodox Church and Bishop Boulos Yazigi of the Greek Orthodox Church. They were abducted in April 2013, and an Italian Jesuit, Fr Paolo Dall'Oglio, went missing three months later. None have been heard from since.