Nigerian officials stepped up efforts on Thursday to negotiate the release of two kidnapped Americans and a Briton after six of the hostages’ fellow oil workers were freed by militants.
On Wednesday, separatist guerrillas allowed two thirds of their captives to go free after holding them for 13 days in the swamps of the Niger Delta.
But three more hostages — identified by rebel and industry sources as United States oil workers Cody Oswald and Russel Spell and British security expert John Hudspith — are still being held.
“We’re stepping up negotiation with their captors so that they can be off the hook imminently,” said Abel Oshevire, spokesperson for Delta State’s Governor James Ibori who is in overall charge of the talks.
“We are aware of the psychological trauma the remaining three will be going through now. Before, there were nine and after the release the remaining three must definitely be depressed,” he said.
“We’re going to make sure that their depression ends soon,” he promised, adding that a former militia leader now working for the state government had gone into the creeks to plead for the hostages’ release.
For their part, the rebel Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) has insisted that the release of the hostages was not as a result of any deal with Ibori’s negotiating team.
The group said Macon Hawkins, a 69-year-old Texan, had been released as a humanitarian gesture because he suffers from diabetes.
The Egyptian, Thai and Filipino hostages are free because their countries have no interests in the Nigerian oil sector, it said.
The two main oil companies working in the creeks west of the oil city of Warri, where Mend is currently operating, are the US giant Chevron and the Anglo-Dutch major Royal Dutch Shell.
On February 18, the nine men were taken from a barge operated by their employer, the US engineering firm Willbros, under contract to Shell.
The gang say they are fighting to win the delta’s 14-million ethnic Ijaws a greater share in the region’s oil revenues and have demanded that Shell pay $1,5-billion in damages to polluted villages.
They also want to see two prominent Ijaw leaders — separatist warlord Mujahid Dokubo Asari and ousted Bayelsa State governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha — released from Nigerian jails. – AFP