THE Move ment for the Emancipation of the Niger-Delta (MEND) threatened yesterday to take at will “as many hostages” as it wanted, saying there was nothing the authorities could do to stop it.
“We will take as many hostages as we wish, when we wish and there is clearly nothing the Nigerian government can do,” a spokesman for the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) said in an e_mail.
The MEND was responding to a statement Thursday by President Olusegun Obasanjo, who denounced the practice of hostage_taking by armed movements in the region as “criminality” that must not be allowed to go on.
“Hostage_taking is not (due to) marginalisation, it is not lack of opportunity to air their views. It is simply criminality,” Obasanjo told a presidential forum on the coastal state.
“We have used carrots, we have used kid gloves, but we cannot continue indefinitely,” he told the gathering.
But MEND, which is still holding hostage one Lebanese national and two Italian oil workers, retorted that it had been the one to go easy on the Nigerian military and oil workers in the Niger Delta.
“It is we who have been handling the Nigerian military and oil workers with kid gloves in the hope that the Nigerian government will understand the futility of its military option in solving the unrest in the delta,” the group said.
“What does he (Obasanjo) plan to do that the military has not already attempted? They should talk less and act more as it is evident they have been unable to calm the fears of the expatriate population in the delta with all this big talk,” it added.
Thursday, MEND released an Italian oil worker Roberti Dieghi, 64, who was seized along with three colleagues on December 7 from one of Agip’s facilities at Brass in Bayelsa.
MEND said that even if it managed to trade its three remaining hostages for “hostages” of Niger Delta origin currently imprisoned by the federal government, it would not let up on its campaign against oil interests in the region.
“We will rather change tactics, desisting from kidnappings and concentrate on acts of sabotage, including bombings, aimed at crippling the oil sector.
“We will continue until we succeed in driving out the oil companies from the delta and permanently halting Nigerian exports to the world oil market,” it added.
A Briton was killed late last year in an attempt by the military to rescue a group of kidnapped foreign oil workers.