Two Russian sailors abducted from their ship off Cameroon are in good health and may have been taken by their captors to neighboring Nigeria, said the ship’s owner and the Seafarers’ Union of Russia.
Unidentified gunmen raided the Greek-owned cargo ship North Spirit on May 16 while it was at anchor off the port of Douala, taking the captain and chief engineer in an attack that analysts say marks an expansion in the range of West African piracy.
The pirates also attacked a nearby Lithuanian vessel, Argo, seizing that ship’s captain and robbing its safe.
The captain of the North Spirit “was allowed to make a call last night and said he and his crew mate were alive and in good health,” said Vadim Ivanov, spokesman for the Seafarers’ Union of Russia. “He said they had been taken by sea to Nigeria.”
The captain, Boris Tersintsev, is from Vladivostok. The other kidnapped Russian, Igor Shumik, was aboard the Arctic Sea ship that mysteriously disappeared in a purported pirate attack last summer.
The North Spirit raid is the latest in a string of pirate attacks in the Gulf of Guinea, a region stretching from the Guineas in the northwest to Angola in the south, that is an increasingly important source of oil to Western markets.
Negotiators hired by the insurance company of the Greek ship owner, Balthellas Chartering, are trying to make contact with the pirates to secure the sailors’ release.
“They are trying to start [negotiations], but the pirates haven’t contacted them yet,” said Panayotis Nikoletos, Balthellas’ operations manager.
He said he believed that the Lithuanian captain was with the two Russians and added that the company was trying to confirm reports that the three were in Nigeria.
A spokesman for Limarko, owner of the Argo, declined to comment.
Analysts said the attack near the port of Douala — which serves land-locked Chad and Central African Republic, as well as some parts of the two Congos — showed that pirates in the region were venturing further south and were becoming more brazen.
Attacks in the Gulf of Guinea have mostly been clustered off the Bakassi Peninsula on the restive Nigeria-Cameroon border where various armed groups operate.
Cameroon last month blamed piracy for part of a 13 percent slide in oil production in 2009. The country’s output averaged 73,000 barrels per day last year, down from 84,000 bpd in 2008.
Attacks in the Gulf of Guinea are not on the scale of those off Somalia, where pirates are earning tens of millions of dollars from seizing merchant vessels, but analysts say the insecurity off West Africa could affect shipping and investment.
The U.S. military is training West and Central African navies and coast guards to combat piracy, drug smuggling and illegal fishing in the Gulf of Guinea — a region that Washington estimates will supply a quarter of U.S. oil by 2015.