Grieving relatives in the Niger Delta jungle river port of Ojobo have accused Nigerian soldiers of shooting dead seven unarmed demonstrators during a community protest on an oil rig operated for the Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell.
On November 20, a group of young men and village elders took a flotilla of speedboats across the Bomadi Creek from Ojoba to ”Rig 75”, a mobile platform operated for Shell by the US firm Parker Drilling, to protest against what they see as the oil companies’ failure to honour a promise to invest in the community.
As the protesters boarded the rig troops arrived from a nearby oil facility, Shell’s Benisede flow station, where they are based, and gunfire broke out.
What happened next is unclear and bitterly disputed; while the army insists that no one was killed and Shell says that an initial inquiry found no evidence of fatalities, clearly distraught relatives showed reporters seven fresh graves which they said were filled with the victims of the shooting.
”These are the young men that the army shot at the rig. We found their corpses floating in the water,” John Zuokumor, a 59-year-old local politician, told reporters standing by a plot holding six mounds of freshly turned earth marked only with simple crosses spliced together from reeds.
Army spokesman Colonel Yusuf Mohammed said: ”They are all telling lies. The elders were having a meeting with the oil company when the youths disrupted them. The soldiers came to disperse them and only some few of them were injured. The army did not kill anybody, it’s all lies.”
However, both the army and Shell confirmed that 12 young men were shot and wounded in the incident and flown by company helicopters to the oil city of Warri for treatment. The military said they were injured during a scuffle in which a demonstrator attempted to grab a soldier’s weapon.
The managing director of Shell’s Nigerian arm SPDC, Basil Omiyi, told reporters that an initial Shell inquiry had not found any evidence of fatalities and that he would be ”extremely surprised if anyone had died”, but that the firm will revisit the matter and he would welcome an independent investigation. – Sapa-AFP