(Reuters) – Nigerian militants fired warning shots at military gunboats in the creeks of the Niger Delta late on Tuesday as the army tried to flush out those behind an attack on Shell’s main offshore oilfield.
President Umaru Yar’Adua ordered the armed forces to tighten security in the delta after last Thursday’s attack on Royal Dutch Shell’s Bonga facility, which forced the Anglo-Dutch company to stop production for several days.
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which claimed responsibility for the attack, said a unilateral ceasefire it announced on Sunday would hold but that it would call it off “at the slightest provocation or threat”.
“The Nigerian military blocked the channel leading into one of our major camps in Bayelsa state with eight heavily armed gun boats in preparation for what seemed like a dawn invasion,” the group said in an e-mailed statement.
“Our fighters headed towards the army position and fired warning shots … thereby averting a clash and maintaining the ongoing ceasefire,” it said.
Chris Musa, commander of a military taskforce unit in the southern state of Bayelsa, said his soldiers had come under attack while they carried out surveillance on the camp near Pennington River thought to be harbouring the Bonga attackers.
“Our men were in the area in respect of the order given by the president that the group responsible for the attack on Bonga should be fished out,” Musa told Reuters.
“We had intelligence reports that the camp was responsible for the attack, so we went after them,” he said. He said he had no details of casualties.
Oil output in Nigeria — the world’s eighth biggest exporter — has been cut by around a fifth in recent years due to a campaign of sabotage by militants who say they are seeking greater benefit for local communities from the industry.
The attack on Bonga, 120 km (75 miles) off Nigeria’s coast, was the first significant strike by MEND on a deepwater site and shocked an industry which had believed such facilities to be relatively safe.
Yar’Adua’s administration is organising a peace summit meant to address the root causes of the unrest in the Niger Delta.
Ibrahim Gambari, a former Nigerian foreign minister and special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed by Yar’Adua to prepare the summit, said on Tuesday he would seek a 90-day truce with the militants as a first step.
He pledged to go into the creeks of the Niger Delta, where five decades of oil extraction by international firms have polluted the land and water, to hold consultations with the militants ahead of the summit, due next month.
MEND has said it will only participate in the peace summit if Henry Okah — one of its leaders on trial for treason and gun-running — is allowed to attend.