Nigerian troops shot four river pirates, killing two of them, when an armed gang attempted to hijack a group of oil barges belonging to the Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell, a miltary spokesperson said on Friday.
Major Said Ahmed said a gunbattle erupted overnight on Wednesday at Shell’s Ogomu facility on the outskirts of the unruly oil city of Warri, a port in the troubled Niger Delta region 340km east of Lagos.
”Some youths attempted to steal some oil barges, it’s their normal trademark. They came in under the guise of dark, then they opened up on the soldiers. There was gunfire,” he said in a telephone call from Warri.
”Two were shot and injured, two were killed. We had no casualties,” said Hamed, who is spokesperson for a joint military taskforce that has been sent to keep the peace in Warri since ethnic conflict erupted in March last year.
News of the latest attack on Shell barges came after the firm confirmed that a so-far peaceful protest by villagers in the Erhiemu oil field, east of Warri, had forced the firm to shut down daily production of 5 000 barrels of crude.
”We are attempting to dialogue with them, so that production can resume,” a Shell official said on Thursday after protesters occupied an oil pumping station and demanded the firm build a road to serve their community.
Erhiemu and Warri lie in the Niger Delta region, a Scotland-sized tract of coastal swamp and rainforest criss-crossed by oil pipelines and blighted by pollution, poverty and ethnic violence.
Many of Shell’s facilities in the wetlands west of Warri have lain abandoned since March last year when fighting erupted between the rival Ijaw and Itsekiri communities and with military units, leaving scores dead. — Sapa-AFP