Troops hunt pirate gang
2006-01-13 12:36
Abuja - Nigerian troops were searching on Friday for an armed pirate gang, which stormed an oil industry supply vessel and kidnapped four foreign workers, said a military spokesperson.
Captain Obiara Medani said the hostages were taken on Wednesday after about 40 gunmen in three canoes seized the boat, Liberty Service, in waters off the Niger Delta, 180km east of Lagos.
He said: "We are making efforts to identify the group that took them and find out where they are", explaining that the kidnappers were thought to have taken the men into the winding creeks of the delta swamp.
The hostages included an American, a Briton and a Bulgarian, but reports differed about the identity of the fourth. A spokesperson for the oil firm Shell said he was from Honduras, while navy and army officers said he was Hungarian.
The official said the men worked for two Shell subcontractors - Tidex and Ecodrill - on the EA offshore oil field in the Gulf of Guinea.
Production halted
Following the kidnapping, production in the EA field was halted as a security measure, cutting Shell's production by 120 000 barrels a day.
In a second incident, an unidentified gang sabotaged a major pipeline on the Brass River carrying crude from a network of wells in the delta swamp, forcing Shell to cut production by a further 106 000 barrels.
Taken together, the shut downs came to more than nine percent of Nigeria's total production and the events had pushed up prices on a world oil market already spooked by rising international tensions over Iran's nuclear programme.
Nigeria is Africa's biggest source of oil, producing 2.6 million barrels a day last year, and the world's sixth biggest exporter of crude.
But, in spite of the industry's multi-billion-dollar profits, most Nigerians still lived in poverty and the Niger Delta was plagued by a variety of heavily armed ethnic militant groups and pirate gangs.
Kidnappings of expatriates were fairly common, but most foreign workers were released unharmed, often after their employers paid ransoms.