LAGOS

Nigeria’s anti-graft agency said on Friday it has returned ,5-million to a Chinese old woman who was victim of an advance fee fraud perpetrated over a five-year period. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission said in a statement the money was handed back to 86-year-old Juliana Ching in Hong Kong on September 26, 2005 after it was recovered from a criminal gang.

Robbers shot dead a Nigerian policeman in a raid on a United States-owned oil services company in the restive southern city of Port Harcourt on Friday, police said. Gunmen attacked police guarding the Willbros depot in Choba on the outskirts of the city and killed one officer, said Rivers State police commissioner Samuel Adetuyi.

Nigerian separatist militants issued what they described as a final warning to international oil giants on Friday demanding they evacuate installations in the Niger Delta within two days or face armed attack. ”We will kill every iota of oil operations in the Niger Delta,” said the statement from the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force.

Nigerian militia fighters have seized and shut down a Chevron oil flow station, a militia leader said. The militia has threatened to shut down oil operations in the southern Niger delta — where most of Opec member Nigeria’s crude is produced — unless its leader, Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, is released from detention.

More than 20 000 Nigerians marched through their bustling economic capital, Lagos, on Wednesday in a noisy but trouble-free protest against rising fuel prices and President Olusegun Obasanjo’s increasingly unpopular economic policies. Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka was among well-known figures leading the march.

Nigeria’s police will withdraw their entire contingent of 120 officers serving on a United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo over sexual-harassment allegations. ”We are withdrawing the entire contingent because when one is contaminated, the whole bunch is contaminated,” a police spokesperson said.

The Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell resumed production at an oilfield in southern Nigeria that was shut down last week because of a community protest over a spill that polluted local farmland, a Shell spokesperson said on Monday. The announcement will come as a small relief to nervous oil markets monitoring unrest in Iraq and Ecuador and watching prices hovering close to record levels.

Up to 90 people are missing and presumed drowned after a Nigerian river ferry sank in floodwaters near where a bridge was washed away last week, officials and witnesses said on Tuesday. The overcrowded boat capsized on Monday as it carried traders across the Lamurde river near Jalingo, the capital of Taraba state.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has lauded the production of the first anti-retroviral drugs used to battle Aids to be produced by an indigenous firm in the country, his office said on Monday. Obasanjo said during the presentation of the Aids drug by a local drug firm that he is encouraged by the achievement of the company.

At least 10 people have drowned and more are missing after weekend flooding that destroyed a bridge and a residential area of the town of Jalingo in north-eastern Nigeria, a government official said on Monday. Nigerian press reports said that as many as 50 people may have drowned.

A heavily-laden cargo jet arriving in heavy rain from Dubai overshot the tarmac at Lagos airport on Wednesday in the latest in a series of accidents to shake confidence in Nigeria’s aviation industry. No-one was reported hurt in the drama but many flights were delayed as ground crews worked to unload the plane and drag it away from the runway.

An Air France jet ran into a stray cow as it landed in the southern Nigerian oil city of Port Harcourt on Wednesday, airport and airline officials said, adding that no one was injured in the incident. The Airbus A330 passenger liner was arriving overnight from Paris when it drove into a herd that had somehow strayed on to the tarmac.

African Union-mediated peace talks on the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region are set to open in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, on Friday, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo’s spokesperson said on Monday. Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court in The Hague said it will launch a war-crimes probe into atrocities committed in Darfur.

A number of construction workers were still trapped on Thursday, two days after a building under construction caved in, killing at least 10 in Nigeria’s southern oil city of Port Harcourt, police said. The four-storey building on Sani Abacha Road in the city centre suddenly collapsed on Tuesday.

At least 10 people were killed and several others trapped when a building collapsed in Nigeria’s southern oil city of Port Harcourt, police said on Wednesday. The four-storey building under construction on Sani Abacha Road in the city centre suddenly caved in on Tuesday, killing at least 10 construction workers.

Pope John Paul II’s funeral on Friday was marked in low-key fashion in Nigeria — the nation from which one possible successor has been tipped to come — but thousands turned out for Masses and held days of mourning in other parts of Africa. In South Africa’s largest township, Soweto, the Regina Mundi Catholic church held a special Mass.

Nigeria’s main oil unions backed down from calling an immediate strike to protest the use of casual labour on Monday but launched a new 21-day ultimatum to international energy giants and the government. A disruption to Nigeria’s exports will send a shockwave through markets at a time when oil prices are already near their all-time high.

Nigeria’s House of Representatives has called on the government to halt further repayments on the country’s staggering -billion in external debts. The motion, approved by the Lower House, said the debt burden is a brake on social and economic development, and the amount owed continues to increase because of accrued interest.