Gunmen kidnap two foreign oil workers

Gunmen abducted two expatriate employees of Italian oil services company Saipem in the southern Nigerian oil centre of Port Harcourt on Thursday said police, in the latest in a series of attacks on oil installations and workers. Samuel Adetuyi, police chief in the Rivers State with Port Harcourt as its capital, said the two men were snatched when gunmen held up a bus taking oil workers to their office on Thursday morning. “We’ve got their names from their company and we’re working to secure their freedom,” Adetuyi told reporters, but did not disclose the identities or nationalities of the missing workers. This is the latest sign of escalating violence in the region that produces nearly all of Nigeria’s multi-billion dollar oil wealth. On Wednesday a gunman on a motorbike shot dead a US national working for international drilling company Baker Hughes in Port Harcourt. No one has claimed responsibility for either incident. The militant Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which has said it is carried out several attacks on oil installations in the past six months that have cut Nigeria’s oil exports by one fifth, has denied responsibility for the attacks. MEND has repeatedly warned all oil workers in the Niger Delta to leave, saying they are targets in its armed campaign to win local control of the delta’s oil. Early in April the group, which claims to be fighting for the interests of the mainly ethnic Ijaw inhabitants of the Niger Delta, released the last of nine foreign oil workers it abducted in February. MEND had also released four foreigners in January unharmed after a three week ordeal. In recent weeks MEND has claimed it committed two car bomb attacks in the region, one in military barracks in Port Harcourt which killed two people, and another in the oil town of Warri which left no casualties. The Niger Delta remains desperately poor despite its oil wealth that is the mainstay of the Nigerian economy, providing 95 percent of government revenue. Decades of restiveness have grown increasingly violent in recent years.