A NIGERIAN oil worker, who escaped after armed youths invaded a flow station in Bayelsa State, is dead.
The victim, who worked with the Nigerian Agip Oil Company (NAOC), reportedly drowned while attempting to find his way out of the danger zone. The incident occurred at Ogbainbiri yesterday morning.
Sources at Ogbainbiri told The Guardian that the body of the Agip employee, who hailed from Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni Local Council of Rivers State, was discovered by fishermen in the early hours of yesterday.
Armed youths had in the early hours of Monday overrun an Agip flow station and took 27 people, including 11 soldiers hostage.
A source in Agip office in Port Harcourt, who pleaded anonymity, said that the management was notified of the tragic demise of the worker in the company’s production unit.
According to him, the deceased was among the few Agip workers that escaped from the flow station shortly after the armed youths from Ogbainbiri stormed the facility. The Guardian learnt that the militants had threatened to kill the captured workers, prompting some of them, including the deceased to escape.
It is believed that the victim died from exhaustion, following his inability to swim to safety inside the swamp.
The search for the oil worker began on Monday when his colleagues who survived the tortuous journey through the creeks to Port Harcourt realised that he did not make the energy-sapping trip.
Some officials of Agip in Port Harcourt, said the deceased colleagues had assumed that he might have probably decided to remain in the creeks till a more auspicious time to continue the escape bid.
Unfortunately, their expectation to reunite with the victim was dashed following the discovery of his floating body on the Ogbainbiri River.
The body, which has been recovered, was deposited in an undisclosed morgue in Yenagoa, the Bayelsa State capital.
The armed youths reportedly invaded the flow station to protest the killing of nine of their compatriots by soldiers who probably had mistaken them for militants.
At the time of the attack, there were 24 local workers and 51 soldiers within the premises. 40 soldiers and eight workers reportedly managed to leave the flow station.