Unknown gunmen have kidnapped a Russian woman in southern Nigeria’s oil capital Port Harcourt, the local police chief said Sunday
The woman, who works for a catering company, was abducted on Saturday around 8:00 pm (1900 GMT) on Port Harcourt’s new Airforce Link Road, Commissionner Felix Ogbaudu said.
Local residents said the woman is married to a Nigerian from another southern state, Akwa Ibom, and that she was going home from work when she was snatched.
Over the past week alone 28 foreigners have been kidnapped in oil-rich southern Nigeria, although eight of them were released within hours of being seized.
Militant groups in the region do not normally kidnap women. Of the scores of foreign hostages taken since the start of the year none has been a woman.
Reports that for the first time ever a woman, a Filipina, had been kidnapped in Port Harcourt in February sparked widespread panic in the expatriate community there and caused many of the few foreigners there with their wives to evacuate them.
Reports circulated that the woman, married to an Iranian, had either jumped from a boat to escape her attackers and drowned or that she had been killed.
The Philippines immigration authorities however, subsequently said she had returned home to the Philippines via Frankfurt.
The armed groups who kidnap foreigners in the Niger Delta are a mixture of well organized groups with political agendas who strike at major government or oil company targets and criminal gangs out to make ransom money.
Industry sources said the kidnappers of the Russian likely fell into the second category.
Update:
(RIA Novosti) – The woman kidnapped in Nigeria is a citizen of Belarus, an adviser to the Russian embassy in the African country said Sunday.
Western news agencies reported May 6 that unknown gunmen had kidnapped Saturday night a Russian woman who worked for a local oil company. The woman was kidnapped in Nigeria’s main oil city of Port Harcourt.
“This is preliminary information, of course. She is a citizen of Belarus. Her name is Irina,” Viktor Goncharov said over the phone.
The Belarusian Foreign Ministry confirmed Sunday that a Belarusian national had been kidnapped in Nigeria.
“We have just received a notice from the Belarusian embassy in Great Britain through diplomatic channels that a citizen of Belarus has been kidnapped in Nigeria,” the ministry’s spokesman said.
Goncharov also said that the Russian embassy in Nigeria will deal with the release of the kidnapped woman because Belarus has no diplomatic mission in that African country.
“We’ll have to deal with this case. The Belarusian Foreign Ministry will apparently delegate the right to deal with her release to us,” Goncharov said.