A Belgian man working for a building materials company has been murdered in the oil city of Warri, in Nigeria’s lawless Niger Delta, and two suspects have been arrested, police said on Sunday.
The police commissioner of Delta state, where Warri is located, said the man’s Nigerian girlfriend and driver had been arrested on suspicion of hiring two gunmen to ambush and kill the man on Saturday so they could keep his property.
“He died of gunshot wounds yesterday evening. It is a clear case of murder,” the commissioner said by telephone from Warri.
Crime and militancy are worsening in the Niger Delta, where 38 foreign hostages are being held by different armed groups. A Dutch oil worker was among three people killed on January 16 in a suspected armed robbery in another part of the delta.
The vast wetlands region accounts for all oil production from Nigeria, the world’s eighth-biggest exporter, and violence has surged in the past 12 months. A fifth of oil output has been shut down since a series of militant attacks last February.
The armed forces are unable to control the delta’s maze of mangrove-lined creeks and major cities like Port Harcourt and Warri have also become anarchic and dangerous.
A U.S. oil executive was shot dead in his car by a gunman on a motorcycle in Port Harcourt in May last year in an apparently planned assassination.
Poverty fuels crime and militancy in the delta’s neglected towns and villages, where people living without electricity or clean water feel cheated out of the oil wealth being pumped from their lands.