Nigerian troops were searching on Friday for an armed gang which stormed an oil industry supply vessel and kidnapped four foreign workers, a military spokesperson said.
The hostages were taken on Wednesday when around 40 gunmen in three canoes seized the boat Liberty Service in waters off the Niger Delta, 180km east of Lagos, naval Captain Obiara Medani said.
”We are making efforts to identify the group that took them and find out where they are,” he said, explaining that the kidnappers are thought to have taken the men into the winding creeks of the delta swamp.
Medani said the pirates were armed with military-style weapons such as Kalashnikov assault rifles, but denied reports in the Nigerian media that there had been a gunbattle and that naval personnel had also been captured.
”We had a patrol in the area at the time, but it was visiting another platform. When they got back the kidnappers had gone,” he said.
The hostages include an American, a Briton and a Bulgarian.
Reports differ about the identity of the fourth. A spokesperson for oil firm Shell said he is from Honduras, while navy and army officers said he is Hungarian.
The men work for two Shell subcontractors — Tidex and Ecodrill — on the EA offshore oil field in the Gulf of Guinea, the Shell official said.
Following the kidnapping production in the EA field was halted as a security measure, cutting Shell’s production by 120 000 barrels per day.
”We are working with the service companies and the authorities towards the safe release of the hostages,” said Shell’s Bernadette Cunnane.
Security sources said the gang had not issued any ransom demands and it is not clear whether they are simple criminals or if they are from a local community in dispute with Shell over jobs and compensation.
In a second incident, an unidentified gang sabotaged a major pipeline on the Brass River carrying crude from a network of wells in the delta swamp, forcing Shell to cut production by a further 106 000 barrels.
Taken together, the shut downs come to more than nine percent of Nigeria’s total production. The events have put upwards pressure on a world oil market already spooked by rising tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme.
Prices hit a three-month high on Thursday before falling back. As Asian markets opened on Friday, Nigerian sweet light crude was down 21 cents to $63,73 a barrel from its US close of $63,94.
Nigeria is Africa’s biggest source of oil, producing 2,6-million barrels per day last year, and the world’s sixth biggest exporter of crude.
But in spite of the industry’s multibillion-dollar profits, most Nigerians still live in poverty and the Niger Delta is plagued by a variety of heavily armed ethnic militant groups and pirate gangs.
Kidnappings of expatriates are fairly common, but most foreign workers are released unharmed, often after their employers pays ransoms.
In a separate incident on Thursday, striking Nigerian oilworkers temporarily blockaded some of their international colleagues on board an ExxonMobil offshore platform at Yoho, off the delta, in a pay dispute, Medani said.
That incident has now been resolved peacefully, he added. – Sapa-AFP