(Reuters) – Gunmen kidnapped eight foreign oil workers from a ship off Nigeria’s Niger Delta on Saturday, bringing the total number of oil workers seized in the past 48 hours to 16, security sources said.
“There was an attack on a ship and 8 whites were kidnapped … They were taken under gunfire,” Lieutenant-Colonel Sagir Musa, military spokesman in the eastern Niger Delta, said.
The security contractor said the men were taken from a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) tanker just off the mouth of the Bonny River in the southern delta.
Their nationalities were not immediately known.
In an earlier attack, gunmen took 11 Russians and a Ukrainian on a vessel off Bonny late on Thursday. Some were released on Friday but five were still being held, security officials said.
More than a dozen men in speedboats kidnapped two oil engineers, one from the Philippines and one Nigerian, from a vessel in the main industry hub of Port Harcourt on Friday. Another Filipino was seized while buying food on land.
Security sources said it was not clear whether the same group was behind all the kidnappings. No ransom demands have yet been publicly made.