Six killed as troops raid Delta village for arms

Six people were killed when Nigerian troops raided an Ijaw village in the troubled Niger Delta in search of weapons and were engaged in a gun battle by armed militants, a military spokesman said. The incident occurred last Friday when troops from the joint military task force operating in the region that produces most of Nigeria’s oil, raided Ogodobiri village, some 40 kilometres east of the city of Warri, Force Commander Brig-Gen Elias Zamani told reporters. He said the raiding party was searching for weapons used by members of ethnic militia groups, pirates and other criminal gangs active in the swampy region. Zamani said the gunmen who had made the village inhabited by the Ijaw ethnic group their base, opened fire on his troops, killing one soldier. Five members of the gang were killed in the ensuing exchange of fire, but the remainder escaped, he added. Nigerian security forces have mounted an offensive against armed militants blamed for crude oil theft, ethnic violence and the disruption of oil operations in the region since a late April attack on a boat belonging to ChevronTexaco in which seven people, including two US oil workers, were killed. On 5 June, at least 17 militants were killed in a similar confrontation with troops at the village of Pere-Otugbene, in the same Burutu disctrict where Ogodobiri is located. On 1 June, leaders of rival ethnic Ijaw and Itsekiri militia groups, who have been embroiled in fighting over claims to land and oil benefits for the past seven years, shook hands on a peace agreement in Warri after coming under heavy government pressure. Both sides pledged that their supporters would stop the fighting that has sometimes cut Nigeria’s oil production of more than two million barrels daily by up to 40 percent. The signing of the peace agreement coincided with a crackdown by the security forces aimed at ridding Warri and the surrounding area of the guns and the criminals that have fuelled violence in the Delta for the past decade.