Italian oil company Saipem is negotiating with the kidnappers of a Colombian employee who was seized in Nigeria this week, the hostage’s daughter said Saturday.
Colombian engineer Libardo Valderrama and a Filipino colleague were kidnapped Thursday when gunmen attacked a compound belonging to Saipem in southern Nigeria. Another Colombian worker was killed in the attack.
Valderrama’s daughter, Sandra, said Saipem representatives told the family that the company has contacted the kidnappers and that her father “is doing well.”
“They told us to be calm because they are negotiating his release,” she told AFP by telephone from Ibague, a city about 150 kilometers (90 miles) west of Bogota.
Kidnappings are frequent in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region.
Since the start of 2006 more than 200 foreigners, most of them oil workers, have been taken hostage. Most have been released unhurt after a few days or a few weeks, often in exchange for a ransom.
In recent months, armed groups in the Delta have tended to target family members of prominent Nigerians in ransom kidnappings rather than foreign oil workers, who had previously been frequent targets.
The region’s most vocal and best-equipped militant group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), denied on Saturday involvement in Thursday’s attack.
The past two years have seen an upsurge in violence in the region by armed groups who claim to be seeking a larger share of southern Nigeria’s oil resources for local residents.