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Nigerian guerrillas release last three oil hostages: official
George Esiri/Reuters
A militant stands in the Nigeria's Delta state, February 24, 2006. Three foreign oil workers, two Americans and a Briton, were freed on Monday by Nigerian militants who had held them hostage for five weeks, officials said.
By Dave Clark
AFP
LAGOS
Petroleumworld.com 03 27 06Nigerian separatist guerrillas released three kidnapped oil workers -- two Americans and a Briton -- on Monday after holding them hostage for more than a month, according to a state government spokesman.
Abel Oshevire told AFP that US oilmen Cody Oswald and Russell Spell and British security expert John Hudspith had been handed over to officials in Warri after being held captive in the swamps of the Niger Delta.
"They're all here. They're all OK," the Delta State spokesman said by telephone from his government's local offices in Warri, an oil port 340 kilometres (210 miles) southeast of Lagos.
Oshevire said that no deal had been offered to the hostage-takers but that the expatriates had been released unharmed and had met Governor James Ibori after being brought to Warri by boat in the dead of night.
An oil industry source confirmed the release and said that US and British diplomats had witnessed the safe arrival of the three former hostages.
The men were among a group of nine foreign workers who were kidnapped on February 18 by heavily-armed militants fighting for control of the delta's oil resources. The other six men were released after just a week.
The men, who work for the US engineering firm Willbros under contract to the Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell, had been working on a pipelaying barge on a river opposite the large Forcados oil export terminal when they were captured.
Militants from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) -- the latest in a series of armed ethnic Ijaw nationalist groups to spring from the delta swamps -- fought a gunbattle with navy troop during the snatch.
Following the kidnapping the group also stepped up dynamite attacks on oil pipelines and wells, hitting facilities operated by Shell, the US major Chevron and the Italian firm Agip, a subsidiary of the giant ENI.
Nigeria, which is Africa's biggest oil producer with exports of around 2.5 million barrel per day, has lost production equivalent to 543,000 barrels per day and the crisis has forced world oil prices above 64 dollars per barrel.
Despite Nigeria's vast oil revenues the majority of the country's 130-million-strong population lives in abject poverty on less than one dollar per day and resentment against government and the oil majors runs high.
The 14-million-strong Ijaw ethnic group forms the majority in the delta, the heartland of the oil and gas sector, and many members of their community dream of creating an oil-rich independent state.
The hostage-takers, in emails to the media, demanded that Nigeria pull its military forces out of the delta and free three prominent Ijaw leaders currently being held in federal jails on various charges.
They also insisted that the men would not be released until Shell paid 1.5 billion dollars (1.2 billion euros) to Ijaw fishing villages in compensation for oil industry pollution.
Oshevire said that Ibori had urged the militants, whom he has previously described as "our boys" and as representatives of an aggrieved community, to no longer resort to kidnapping to push their demands.
"This was supposed to be a happy day, with the release of the hostages, but it's not happy because we don't like this situation of hostage taking," he said, according to his spokesman.
Since the start of the year, Ijaw guerrillas have kidnapped 13 foreign oil workers.
All have now been released, but the conflict has cost the lives of two Nigerian contract workers and more than 25 members of the security forces.
AFP 27 03 06 04 01 GMT
Copyright © 2006 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
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