The death threat against six French hostages seized from an oil vessel off Cameroon on Friday has been lifted, a commander of a militia group involved in the attack said on Saturday.
“We held a peace meeting last night (Friday) and decided not to kill the French hostages because we have no problem with France,” said Colonel Ebi Dari, a leader of the Niger Delta Defence and Security Council (NDDSC).
“However, we will not free them until the Cameroon government gives us audience and we tell them exactly what we want,” he told Reuters, without detailing his group’s demands.
Dari said on Friday he and an allied group had carried out the raid in which 10 hostages, six of them French, were taken.
He had previously said the NDDSC and the Bakassi Freedom Fighters — militia groups from Cameroon’s Bakassi peninsula, known to contain offshore oil — would kill the hostages if the Cameroonian government did not meet their demands.
The NDDSC says it wants the government to contact the groups, which began a string of attacks on Cameroonian military forces in the run-up to Nigeria’s handover of Bakassi to Cameroon on Aug. 14 after a decades-long border dispute.
It has previously said it wants Cameroon and Nigeria to renegotiate the deal that gave Cameroon control over Bakassi, and that Nigerians who chose to leave the area be compensated.
Some security experts say groups such as the NDDSC may be Nigerian militants spreading their campaign against the oil industry in the Niger Delta across the eastern border into Cameroon.
Attacks on oil workers and installations in the Delta, the source of the two thirds of Nigeria’s oil, has sapped production in Africa’s biggest exporter of crude.
Cameroon has not indicated whether it is prepared to negotiate with the kidnappers, but said on Saturday it would work to free the hostages.
“All means and measures have been put in place to preserve the lives of the hostages, identify the kidnappers and assure the security of all people moving into and out of the national territory,” the government said on state radio, without giving further details of its rescue plan.
Gunmen in speedboats seized six French, two Cameroonians, one Senegalese and one Tunisian from the “Bourbon Sagitta”, an oil vessel contracted by French oil company Total.
Dari confirmed the numbers after earlier saying seven of those kidnapped were French.
Last month, Nigeria said it wanted to set up a joint security force with Cameroon to police Bakassi, where it said the lack of a strong law enforcement agency was allowing criminal gangs to flourish.