Attackers tossed an explosive device into the vehicle of a top port official working in Nigeria’s chaotic oil region, killing the official’s driver and wounding a security guard, police said Tuesday.
The driver had just dropped off the regional port director, Sotoye Itomi, when assailants threw an as-yet unidentified device into the vehicle late Monday, said a Rivers State police spokeswoman, Ireju Barasua. The driver died in the blast and a police guard was injured, she said.
Itomi had in recent days publicly disputed assertions by the region’s main militant group that it had remotely detonated a bomb onboard a ship docked in the area. Itomi said the blast was accidental. The militant group, Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, couldn’t immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.
Militants have stepped up their attacks in recent weeks, although the level of violence in the southern Niger Delta is still off last year’s record highs.
The militants have offered to cease attacks if one of their leaders is released from prison in Angola, where he’s held on arms-smuggling suspicions. The government has made no public response.
The militants say they’re fighting for more federally controlled oil-industry revenue for their region, which is deeply impoverished despite supplying all the crude for Nigeria’s petroleum industry, Africa’s biggest.
The militants’ campaign of oil-infrastructure bombings and kidnappings of foreign oil workers has slashed Nigeria’s oil output by about 20 percent, helping send global oil prices toward historical highs.