Nigeria’s main militant group said it had blown up a well-head in a Royal Dutch Shell oil field in Delta state late on Thursday, hours after President Umaru Yar’Adua announced an amnesty offer for gunmen.
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) accused the military of going on a ”punitive expedition” to hunt down suspected militants in the Agbeti community of Delta state after Yar’Adua’s amnesty proclamation.
”In response … [operation] Piper Alpha continued its rampage on the Nigerian oil industry by blowing up the second remaining well-head of the Shell Afremo offshore oil fields in Delta state,” Mend said in a statement e-mailed to media.
The military denied carrying out any such campaign.
”Our troops did not carry out any operation in Agbeti. This is a lie, propaganda by these miscreants to justify their attacks on isolated oil facilities,” said Colonel Rabe Abubakar, spokesperson for the joint military taskforce in the Niger Delta.
Afremo was one of the sites Mend also claimed to have attacked in a triple raid on Sunday. It described the field as being 21km from an export terminal through which crude oil from Shell’s Forcados fields is pumped.
A senior industry source said at the time the location was not a deepwater installation, but a facility located in or close to the mangrove creeks, where pipelines and equipment run across broad stretches of water.
Shell has said it is checking its operations for damage from Sunday’s attacks.
Billions in lost revenue
Yar’Adua on Thursday offered the amnesty to gunmen who laid down their weapons during a 60-day period ending on October 4, in a bid to end years of unrest which have cost Africa’s top oil exporter billions of dollars in lost revenue.
Pipeline bombings, attacks on oil and gas installations and the kidnapping of industry workers over the past three years have prevented Nigeria from pumping much above two thirds of its installed capacity of three million barrels per day of oil.
The supply disruption has at times helped push world energy prices higher and cost Africa’s most populous nation, which relies on crude oil for 90% of its foreign earnings, tens of millions of dollars a day.
Mend’s latest campaign of sabotage, which began just more than a month ago and which it has dubbed ”Hurricane Piper Alpha”, has already forced at least 133 000 barrels per day of production to be shut down.
It has again had an impact on global energy prices, helping push oil towards $71 a barrel on Friday.
One faction leader, Ateke Tom, has indicated he would consider taking part in an amnesty while a lawyer for Henry Okah, the suspected leader of Mend who is on trial for treason, has said he hoped his client would be covered by the proposal.
But the unrest in the delta is not a straightforward political struggle. Sceptics question whether an amnesty alone will be enough to halt opportunistic attacks, crude oil theft and kidnapping, much of which generates large amounts of money for armed gangs and the disenfranchised youths they recruit. — Reuters