The fate of the Filipina taken hostage by gunmen on Tuesday in southern Nigeria is still not clear, the Nigerian police and Filipino diplomats said.
“Her whereabouts are unknown”, Felix Ogbaudu, Rivers State police commissionner, told AFP Friday, as some expatriates in the region, jittery after this latest kidnapping, evacuated their wives and families.
“The people we have on the ground have confirmed that she was seized near a bank in the centre of Port Harcourt on Wednesday and that she was taken to an unknown destination, but that is all we know”, an official at the Philippines embassy in Abuja said.
He said the embassy officials in Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers state and the biggest town in the oil-producing Niger delta, have not yet established if the woman in still alive or dead.
Separatist groups seeking a bigger share of oil revenue and criminal gangs out to make ransom money have stepped up attacks on oil and related targets since the beginning of the year.
A variety of ever-bolder armed groups have taken 52 foreigners hostage so far this year, mostly people linked to the oil sector. Some have been seized in broad daylight or pulled from their cars in city centres.
Of those seized this year 28 are still in captivity, along with three others held since early December.
Twenty-six of those held by the armed groups are Philippine nationals.
In Manilla the foreign ministry Friday said it was seeking urgent checks on reports from Nigeria saying the woman was dead.
Sources in Nigeria say the woman, who is married to an Iranian and has two children, may have drowned falling off the kidnappers’ boat or jumping overboard when they tried to assault her.
But Philippine foreign undersecretary Esteban Conejos said he still believed the woman, who has been living in Nigeria for 17 years, was alive and that the abduction was likely a criminal rather than a political act by Nigerian rebels.
Conejos said the kidnappers contacted her husband later that day and told him they were holding her but made no further demands.
The kidnapped woman’s sister, who did not want to be named, told reporters: “We have strong hopes she is still alive. We don’t believe she is dead because my sister is strong in spirit and would not casually risk her life.”
The sister said the embassy told her a helicopter had been sent to confirm reports about a body floating in the sea.
“They told me the search was negative and that no body was found.”
The Philippine embassy in Nigeria has been in daily touch with authorities trying to free dozens of foreigners kidnapped over recent weeks.
Conejos said he believed the woman’s abduction was a “police case,” unlike the abduction of 24 Filipino seamen last month and a Filipino engineer on Tuesday in the Niger Delta.
He said that unlike those cases, the woman was not abducted in the hinterlands or at sea and she was not involved in the oil industry which the Nigerian rebels were targetting.
He also said the government saw no need to repatriate the estimated 3,900 Filipinos in Nigeria– most of them oil workers.
A ban on the deployment of more Filipinos to Nigeria, imposed after the abduction of the seamen, remains in place.
Police commissionner Ogbaudu said he is also without news of the Frenchman Gerard Laporal kidnapped later Wednesday in Port harcourt.
For some expatriates in Port Harcourt, the first kidnapping of a woman was the final straw.
“I called a friend of mine in Port Harcourt and she said she and her husband have decided she must leave with the children. They will come to Lagos today and then fly home”, a expatriate in Lagos told AFP on condition of anonymity. Nigeria, Africas largest oil producer, last year lost more than half a million barrels a day due to unrest in the Delta.