A group of eight Westerners — six British, one American and one Canadian — were kidnapped on Friday while working on an offshore oil rig in Nigeria, the platform’s owners said.
A group of people climbed on board the Bulford Dolphin facility off Nigeria’s southern coast at about 4am local time and seized the employees, a spokesperson for Norwegian firm Fred Olsen Energy told Agence France-Presse.
”National and other authorities are cooperating in solving the situation … The drilling operation has been temporarily terminated. The incident has not caused any pollution or damage to the rig,” the company said in a statement.
The Foreign Office in London also confirmed the kidnappings.
”These types of situations are not unusual in Nigeria, and we take them very seriously,” a spokesperson said. ”Our colleagues in Nigeria are contacting local officials in order to discover what has happened.”
The rig is operated by Fred Olsen Energy’s subsidiary, Dolphin Drilling, based in the Scottish city of Aberdeen, the spokesperson for the firm said.
Kidnappings of foreign workers have become increasingly frequent occurrences in the oil-rich Niger Delta.
Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer and world’s sixth oil exporter with around 2,6-million barrels a day, derives more than 95% of its foreign exchange earnings from oil. — AFP
