Nigerian separatist militants released four foreign oil workers on Monday, after holding them hostage in the swamps of the Niger Delta for almost three weeks, officials and their employer said.
The men — an American, a Briton, a Bulgarian and a Honduran — have been handed over to the Bayelsa State government, spokesperson Welson Ekiyor told Agence France-Presse by telephone from the state capital Yenagoa.
Monday’s release will come as a relief to those working in Africa’s largest oil industry, which is reeling from a three-week series of violent attacks that has left 22 members of the security forces and three Nigerian workers dead.
”They’ve been released. They’re with the governor right now. They’re very okay,” Ekiyor said.
A British embassy spokesperson said: ”I can now confirm that they have been released. They’re as well as could be hoped.”
On January 11, a heavily armed ethnic Ijaw militia riding speed boats boarded an oil industry supply vessel and captured four crew members.
The ship, Liberty Service, was owned by US oil services firm Tidewater and was working for the energy giant Shell in the offshore EA oil field off the coast of Bayelsa.
Three of the hostages were employees of Tidewater, a Louisiana-based oil services firm: the boat’s 61-year-old US skipper, Patrick Landry, and engineers Harry Ebanks (54) from Honduras and Milko Yordanor Nitchev (56) from Bulgaria.
The kidnapped Briton was Nigel Watson-Clark, a former paratrooper employed by the British company Ecodrill as a security expert.
”All of the workers will undergo medical examinations before repatriation to their homes and families … We are also grateful that the workers were released unharmed,” said a statement from Tidewater confirming the release.
The hostage-takers had earlier demanded that the Nigerian government release two prominent Ijaw leaders from jail and that Shell pay $1,5-billion in compensation to villages polluted by oil spills.
There was no initial information on Monday as to what kind of a deal, if any, had been struck with the kidnappers to secure the men’s release.
Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil exporter, producing about 2,6-million barrels of crude per day, and the crisis in the Niger Delta has combined with fears of renewed instability in the Middle East to push prices towards historic highs.
On the same day as the hostages were taken, militants blew up Shell’s Trans-Ramos pipeline. Four days later, they stormed the firm’s Benisede oil flow station, killed 14 soldiers and two oilmen, and burned down buildings.
Shell subsequently slashed production by 221 000 barrels per day and warned tankers arriving at its Forcados export terminal to expect delays of up to two weeks in loading crude.
Then on January 24, gunmen wearing camouflage fatigues and armed with AK-47 rifiles stormed an office and workshop complex run by the Italian oil firm ENI in the southern oil city of Port Harcourt.
The unidentified gang killed seven serving policemen, one retired officer seconded to the firm as a security guard and a company accountant, before escaping on speed boats with a large haul of cash.
Two days ago, in almost identical attack, gunmen scared off the police protecting the Korean engineering company Daewoo’s oil services centre outside Port Harcourt and stole $307 000 in cash.
The violence is likely to be one of the items on the agenda at this week’s meeting of the oil exporters’ cartel Opec. On Monday Nigeria’s light sweet crude was up 43 cents to $68,19 a barrel in New York.
Nigeria has been producing oil for five decades, longer than it has been an independent country, but most profits from the multibillion-dollar sector end up in the pockets of multinationals and corrupt government officials.
According to the World Bank, more than three quarters of Nigerians live in abject poverty on less than one dollar per day.
The Niger Delta, a Scotland-sized swathe of coastal swamp and mangrove forest dotted with oil wells and criss-crossed by pipelines, is home to several well-armed illegal militias fighting for a greater share of oil revenues. – AFP
