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/ 17 September 2008
Nigerian militants threatened on Wednesday to broaden their ”oil war” to offshore oilfields.
Rival militant factions in Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta have clashed in an apparent turf war, killing at least four people.
A human rights group said on Thursday that 800 000 residents of the Nigerian capital, Abuja, were forcibly evicted over a four-year period as town planners sought to clear space for the fast-growing city. The Swiss-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions said that many of those removed were not given due notice.
Unidentified gunmen in Nigeria’s restive south have hijacked an oil-services vessel carrying 11 crew members, the military said on Wednesday. The hijackers are demanding about 000 for the release of the boat and the crew, including one Portuguese and one Ukrainian, according to military spokesperson Major Sagir Musa.
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/ 10 December 2007
A protest outside an oil company compound, a high-profile kidnapping and a troop incursion into a militant stronghold on Monday were all signs of the renewed tension in Nigeria’s oil delta. Violence had subsided for a few months in the impoverished Niger Delta as rebel groups held talks with the government about their demands.
Nigerian troops freed a kidnapped British national during a dawn raid on Friday in a village on the outskirts of the country’s oil industry hub of Port Harcourt, a military spokesperson said. Major Sagir Musa said oil worker David Ward was rescued by troops in Abaara Etche village, 30km west of Port Harcourt.
Many residents were too afraid to leave their homes in Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s main oil, on Friday and troops patrolled the streets after dozens were killed in gun battles. Up to 40 people died in street fighting between troops and heavily armed gangsters on Thursday, local newspapers reported, and the gunmen are widely expected to return.
Nigerian troops and gangsters fought gun battles in the oil city of Port Harcourt on Thursday, killing several people, army and private security sources said. The army launched a dawn raid on several criminal hide-outs after six days of street battles between rival gangs last week, and the gangs responded by staging an armed assault on the state government headquarters.
Gang fighting entered its sixth day in the anarchic oil city of Port Harcourt in southern Nigeria on Saturday with authorities acknowledging 11 deaths and residents and media putting the toll much higher. Residents and security sources gave conflicting reasons for the gang war that erupted on Monday and has spread all over the city.
A Nigerian three-year-old boy has been released by his kidnappers one day after he was snatched on his way to school in the lawless Niger Delta, the boy’s father said on Friday. The kidnappers had demanded 10-million naira ( 600) for the child, relatives of the toddler said earlier.
Nigerian kidnappers have demanded 10-million naira ( 600) for a three-year-old boy they snatched on his way to school in the lawless Niger Delta, relatives of the toddler said on Friday. The boy’s abduction on Thursday came just four days after a British girl of the same age was released by her kidnappers in the same area.
Nigerian troops repelled an attack on a construction site run by Korean firm Daewoo in the Niger Delta in the early hours of Tuesday, killing some of the attackers. The attack took place at Mbiama, on the outskirts of the delta’s main city of Port Harcourt, where Daewoo are doing contract work for Italian oil firm Agip.
The Nigerian kidnappers of a three-year-old British girl have demanded money and negotiations to secure her release are about to start, the girl’s mother told Reuters on Friday. The toddler, Margaret Hill, was snatched on Thursday morning from the car in which she was being driven to school in Port Harcourt.
Most people get perhaps one chance in a lifetime to make a truly grand entrance. Not so Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, the Ijaw leader of the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force who was released on bail and returned to Port Harcourt in late June after spending 20 months in detention on charges of treason. Asari was arrested in 2005 after he said during a newspaper interview that he would work for the break-up of Nigeria.
A protest by villagers at a major oil export pipeline complex in Nigeria entered a third day on Thursday and no crude was flowing through the facility, a protest leader said. Villagers from K-Dere occupied the pipeline hub at Bomu on Tuesday and forced Shell to shut 150 000 barrels per day of output.
Suspected militants kidnapped three Indian petrochemical workers from their residence in Nigeria’s oil capital, Port Harcourt, on Saturday, the army said. The militants originally seized 10 workers, all employed by Indonesia’s Indorama, but the military engaged them in a gunfight and rescued seven, the spokesperson for the army in the region said.
Six gunmen wearing military fatigues seized a Nigerian staff member of the Italian oil company Agip on Monday in the Nigeria’s southern petroleum region, police said. The assailants grabbed the human resources manager for Agip, a subsidiary of Italian oil giant Eni SpA, as he drove to work, said Rivers state police spokesperson Irejua Barasua.
Gunmen kidnapped three foreign workers in two separate incidents in Nigeria’s oil-producing delta on Friday, authorities said. Expatriate abductions have become an almost weekly occurrence this year in the world’s eighth largest oil exporter, and thousands have fled the Niger Delta since violence surged last year.
Nigerian troops raided several villages on the outskirts of the country’s main oil-industry centre of Port Harcourt in search of gunmen said to be responsible for a spate of hostage-takings targeting foreign oil workers, a military spokesperson said. Several arrests were made and illegal weapons recovered on Saturday.
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/ 20 February 2007
Gunmen kidnapped two Croatian and one Montenegrin oil worker from a bar in Nigeria’s oil city Port Harcourt, authorities said on Monday. The abduction in the city’s Iwofe district on Sunday night was the latest in a series of attacks against foreign workers in the world’s eighth largest oil exporter.
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/ 8 February 2007
Gunmen kidnapped a Filipino woman in Port Harcourt in Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta, the first known abduction of a woman in the anarchic region, and a Frenchman was seized in a separate incident. Police said gunmen snatched the woman on Wednesday afternoon in a busy street as she was walking between a bank and her car.
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/ 6 February 2007
Lolo Oluchi has painted over the bullet holes in the ceiling of her karaoke bar in Port Harcourt, where gunmen seized seven foreign oil workers last August, but the regulars haven’t come back. Thousands of foreign workers and their families have left Africa’s top oil producer since a faceless new militant group launched unprecedented attacks about a year ago.
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/ 18 January 2007
Militants in Nigeria released five Chinese hostages and one of three Italian oil-workers seized in separate attacks in the country’s oil-rich southern delta region, officials and militants said on Thursday. Nigerian militants have frequently taken foreign workers hostage since launching a wave of attacks on the country’s oil industry since early 2006.
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/ 16 January 2007
Gunmen killed 12 people including four community chiefs in an attack on a commercial boat in the remote creeks of Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta, police said on Tuesday. Western oil companies evacuated staff from three oilfields in the area, accounting for about 60 000 barrels per day of production.
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/ 18 December 2006
Two explosions hit Nigeria’s oil industry on Monday, industry sources said, moments after a militant group threatened to detonate three car bombs in the Niger Delta. There were no casualties reported in either explosion and no immediate impact on oil output from the world’s eighth largest exporter. The first explosion was from an apparent car bomb.
Six foreign oil workers, kidnapped from a nightclub in Nigeria, were released on Wednesday night after 10 days in captivity, authorities said. The six men — two Britons, an American, German, Irish and Pole — were abducted at gunpoint from a nightclub in the southern oil city of Port Harcourt on August 13.
Soldiers searched houses and fired in the air on Friday as the Nigerian military launched a crackdown on suspected militants in the country’s restive, petroleum-rich south, where more than a dozen foreign oil workers have been kidnapped. President Olusegun Obasanjo ordered the clampdown on Tuesday.
A previously unknown group has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of a German contractor last week in Nigeria and demanded the release of two jailed leaders as a condition for his freedom. The group also demanded that the hostage’s employer, construction firm Bilfinger and Berger, provide more infrastructure and jobs to the communities where they work.
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/ 12 December 2005
As the last three survivors of Nigeria’s latest bloody aviation disaster struggled to cling to life on Monday, the bereaved city of Port Harcourt asked why an elderly aircraft could be allowed to spill so much young blood. A newspaper showed school pictures of members of a 71-strong party that was torn up and burnt to death on Saturday.
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/ 12 December 2005
Nigerian accident investigators have found the ”black box” flight-data recorders of a commercial airliner that crashed killing 107 people on board, a spokesperson for the country’s Civil Aviation Authority said on Sunday. An estimated 71 of those who died were schoolchildren from the Loyola Jesuit College in Abuja.