Several pirates were killed and three Nigerian soldiers were injured in a gun battle in the oil-rich swamps near the city of Warri in the unruly Niger Delta, a military spokesperson said on Tuesday.
”It is difficult to say precisely how many of the pirates died because the incident happened on the water. But we know that several of them were shot dead. On our part, three officers were wounded,” Major Said Ahmed said.
He said the clashes occurred on Sunday night when the smugglers ran into a patrol team of navy, soldiers and police at the Jones Creek flowstation, a major oil pumping facility owned by the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell.
”We seized the oil barges they have stolen from the facility and drove them away. But they later fortified themselves and started shooting at our men,” he said, speaking by telephone from Warri.
”We actually expected the action and we fired back, killing a number of them. They quickly carried their casualties away,” he added.
One Nigerian daily, The Comet, reported seven dead in the clashes.
It said the smugglers were ferrying their loot to an undisclosed destination when they ran into an ambush by the joint military task force set up last year by the Nigerian government to patrol the waterways in the volatile region.
The incident was the latest in a region where ethnic unrest, oil piracy and smuggling have combined to disrupt oil production and force thousands of villagers to flee their homes.
Last week, two river pirates were shot dead when they attempted to hijack a group of oil barges belonging to Shell.
Warri lies in the Niger Delta, a tract of coastal swamp and rainforest about the size of Scotland, dotted with oil wells and blighted by 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.
Nigeria is Africa’s top producer of crude, with exports of about two million barrels a day, about half of them from Shell.
Nevertheless, more than three-quarters of the West African country’s 130-million-strong population live in abject poverty on less than $1 a day. — Sapa-AFP