| Fighting eased in the Niger Delta Saturday after clashes with rebels in which the army freed six Filipinos and four Nigerians held hostage aboard a ship, the military and witnesses said.”The cordon and search operation is still continuing on Saturday but at a lower scale,” Colonel Rabe Abubakar, spokesman for the special military task force in the volatile oil-producing region of southern Nigeria, told AFP.
“Yesterday, we succeeded in destroying a key camp of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and routed them,” he added. A journalist in the oil city of Warri, about two hours by car from the scene of the clashes, also said that fighting seemed to have lessened early Saturday. “Yesterday, it was like a war situation. We saw smoke billowing out of Gbaramatu area where the fighting was going on. “But today, so far, things have abated. It looks like the military have the upper hand,” the journalist said. The hostages, seized on Wednesday, were freed overnight by the Nigerian army, Abubakar said earlier Saturday. “We were able to secure the hijacked ship, MV Spirit, a chartered oil tanker. In the night, we rescued all the sailors on board the ship. We freed all the six Filipinos and four Nigerians on board.”. He said that many of the militants were killed by the troops, but declined to give figures. He also said that a quantity of arms and ammunition as well as an aircraft were recovered during the operation. Abubakar declined to say if there had been any aerial fighting or detail the circumstances under which the MEND aircraft was seized. In a short statement, MEND said: “We had no use for the ship and it was abandoned. So, the (military) have only ‘found’ it. The name of the ship is the MV Spirit and none of the captives were on board.” MEND, usually swift to boast of its fighting exploits, provided no further details either on the ship or the hostages. MEND had said on Thursday that an affiliated group was holding “15 foreigners” hostage on a ship seized the day before. However, Abubakar said it was now believed that only 10 people had been detained. Abubakar also said people suspected to be militants Saturday vandalised a major gas pipeline in Delta State. “We have swiftly deployed our men to the area,” he said, without giving further details. Local newspapers reported Saturday on their front pages that dozens of the militants were killed in the clashes, saying fighting had raged in three communities around the Esravos River on Friday. MEND on Friday declared what it called an “all-out war” in the Delta region and repeated a warning to foreign oil producers to pull out by midnight (2300 GMT) or risk being caught up in increasing violence. In the past three and a half years MEND has been behind a series of kidnappings of staff and attacks on oil installations. It says it is fighting for a greater share of the region’s vast oil resources. Unrest in the region means Nigeria last year lost its position as Africa’s leading crude exporter to Angola. Its oil output has fallen by about a quarter since 2006. The west African nation derives more than 95 percent of its foreign exchange earnings from crude oil. |
May162009