Nigerian separatist guerrillas taunted the army with claims of further attacks on Monday after a weekend of violence forced energy giant Shell to slash the country’s oil exports by a fifth.
The insurgents said the military has abandoned one of its posts in waterways west of the oil city of Warri, allowing the militants to dynamite a floating barracks block and another of Shell’s crude oil pipelines.
An army spokesperson was unable to confirm or deny the attack, but officials of the oil giant said it has evacuated all oil plants in the immediate area, bringing Nigeria’s losses to about half-a-million barrels per day.
There was still no news of nine foreign oil workers seized by the gang on Saturday and believed to be being held hostage in the winding creeks of the Niger Delta, heartland of Africa’s biggest oil industry.
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) said the attacks were ”carried out on one houseboat belonging to the Nigerian army and the Shell Ughelli-Odidi-Escravos manifold. Both were destroyed by explosives.”
A military spokesperson in the region could not immediately confirm the incident. ”We are not aware of any new attack,” Major Said Hammed said.
Previous claims made by the militants from the same e-mail address have proved accurate.
A Shell spokesperson said ”some flow stations have been closed down because of the events of the weekend”, and a company official privately confirmed that these were six plants in the swamps west of Warri.
Henry Imhalenjaye, a boat captain who operates in the coastal swamp, said the firm’s flow stations known as Batan, Jones Creek, Odidi I and II and Egwa I and II were not operating on Monday.
Already last month, Shell was forced to close four of its stations south of the city, and on Saturday a violent assault on the Forcados oil terminal forced the firm to suspend loading from the 380 000-barrel-per-day facility.
Despite the announcement that loading had been suspended, the guerrillas said they had heard that part of the equipment had survived Saturday’s attack and that Shell was planning to load a tanker.
”Regardless of whatever security arrangements they depend on and of the time of the day, we will attack this vessel and execute everyone on board,” they warned. Shell could not confirm any such loading plan.
The news prompted oil prices to spike by 2,5% in London trading, bring them to $61,39 per barrel. Trading in New York was suspended for a national holiday, but is expected to open higher on Tuesday.
Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo has so far ruled out the use of force to defeat the rebels — who claim to represent the delta’s 14-million-strong Ijaw tribe — and is seeking to negotiate the release of the hostages.
But Mend, in e-mailed statements to the media, has insisted attacks will continue until Shell pays $1,5-billion to polluted fishing communities and the government releases two jailed Ijaw leaders.
For its part, the government says the gang has no real political cause, and is simply lashing out after a crackdown on ”oil bunkering” — stealing crude oil from illegally tapped pipelines and smuggling it abroad.
Last month, Mend killed at least 14 soldiers in an attack on a Shell flow station and kidnapped four foreign workers, who were later released unharmed after 19 days as captives in various Ijaw villages hidden in the swamps.
Already, negotiations for the release of the latest batch of captives look like being more complicated, and the rebels have warned that ”they may not be treated so well” as their predecessors.
The captives’ employer, the US engineering firm and Shell subcontractor Willbros, has confirmed that three Americans, two Egyptians, two Thais and one Filipino were taken hostage on Saturday in a raid on their pipeline-laying barge.
The Niger Delta, a 70 000-square-kilometre swathe of swampland and mangrove, produces 2,6-million barrels per day, but most people in the region live in grinding poverty and resentment of the government is high. — Sapa-AFP