Officials from Nigeria and Cameroon are meeting in Abuja to try to establish who killed 21 Cameroonian soldiers in the Bakassi peninsula on Tuesday. Some witnesses said the attackers wore Nigerian Army uniforms, but it has blamed militants from the Niger Delta.
The main rebel group, Mend, has said it was not responsible, but has admitted its fighters attacked a nearby Nigerian oil installation earlier the same day.
Nigeria handed over the sensitive and oil-rich peninsula to Cameroon in 2006.
The peaceful transfer came after a ruling by the International Court of Justice which attempted to settle a territorial dispute that led to a series of bloody clashes between the two countries in the 1990s.
Bakassi juts into the Gulf of Guinea, an area which could contain up to 10% of the world’s oil and gas reserves. It is also rich in fish.
Meanwhile, an armed group in Nigeria has blown up and ruptured a major oil pipeline, feeding one of two main crude oil export terminals in the Niger Delta.
Reports say dynamite was used in the attack on Thursday and a large volume of oil was spilled at the Forcados site.
‘Mindless and ridiculous’
The BBC’s Alex Last in Lagos says that most people in the Nigerian security world and even some armed groups in the Niger Delta believe that Tuesday’s deadly attack was the work of a faction of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend).
It could not have been a government action from Nigeria, because relations between Nigeria and Cameroon are excellent
Col Solomon Giwa-Amu
Nigerian military
Earlier the same day, 60 of its fighters, carried in seven speedboats, attacked the major Qua Iboe oil terminal in nearby Akwa Ibom state, it has acknowledged.
The raid in which the Cameroonians died, it is thought, was an attempt to grab more weapons, our correspondent says.
But in a new statement, Mend said it had not attacked the soldiers and instead blamed the Nigerian military.
“The murders of Cameroonian soldiers in Bakassi were carried out by the Nigerian military because of their perceived sympathy to our cause and their blind eye to a weapons [smuggling] route,” it said on Wednesday evening.
The Nigerian authorities have vehemently denied any involvement in the incident and promised to co-operate with Cameroon to find out who was responsible.
“That is mindless and ridiculous,” the Nigerian director of defence information, Col Solomon Giwa-Amu, told the Reuters news agency.
“It could not have been a government action from Nigeria, because relations between Nigeria and Cameroon are excellent.”
Our correspondent says there is, of course, the chance that another group of gunmen were hired for the job, perhaps by those unhappy that the territory – once overwhelmingly populated by Nigerians – had been handed over to Cameroon.
But whoever was responsible, this attack has worried both countries as it shows how the violence of the delta can now spread beyond Nigeria’s borders, he adds.
Source: BBC