Troops exchange fire with Delta youth

Troops sent to the troubled oil state of Bayelsa exchanged gunfire at the weekend with suspected Ijaw youths as the government sought to reassert law and order to the restive area, news reports said.

Official casualty figures were not immediately available but the Lagos daily newspaper with a presence in the southeastern state, ‘The Guardian’, quoted an unidentified doctor at Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital as saying wounded soldiers had been admitted to the facility.

News reports quoted witnesses who said that soldiers along the east-west highway between Mbiama and Bomadi turned back travellers on Sunday. The deployment of troops in the Delta gives more teeth to the warning by President Olusegun Obasanjo on 10 November that he might impose a state of emergency in the area.

During Friday’s summit of Gulf of Guinea states, in Gabon, on conflict resolution Obasanjo said that demands by the people of the Delta had been “perverted from that of development to that of criminality”, state owned Nigerian Television Authority reported at the weekend. He promised tough action.

“Anybody who has contributed in any way to the unrest in the Niger Delta area will not go unpunished,” ‘The Guardian’ quoted Obasanjo as saying in a statement issued by his special assistant, Tunde Olusunle.

Trouble in Bayelsa State began on 4 November in the village of Odi when rampaging youths kidnapped and executed seven policemen. Since then, the daily said, the youths had killed other policemen, soldiers and randomly attacked motorists.