Filipinos taken hostage this weekend in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of southern Nigeria were seized by members of a local community, a prominent separatist group in the region said.
“They were taken by a community in that vicinity. The community plans to explain their reason for their abduction today,” a spokesman for the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) told AFP in an email message.
The Filipinos are being held on the cargo ship they were working on in the southern Delta state.
The ship, which was on its way to Warri, the state capital, was stopped at Okerenkoko on Saturday morning, according to state government officials.
The Filipinos were “understood to be okay,” Ozoene Sheddy, a spokesman for Delta State government told AFP.
It is not the first time Filipinos have been taken hostage in Nigeria. Last August three oil workers were seized and later released.
The latest kidnapping of six Filipinos brings to nine the total number of foreigners currently being held hostage in the volatile region.
It comes just three months ahead of elections meant to see Nigeria’s first ever handover from one civilian administration to another.
By Sunday evening no party had personally claimed responsibility for the abduction.
Kingsley Kuku, a militant spokesman and member of parliament in neighbouring Ondo State, said his group the Ijaw Youth Council was “trying to intervene” between the kidnappers and government officials but that “the Ijaw people are running out of patience”.
Referring to the youths holding the Filipinos he said: “The demands they have made are the same demands that are always made. They want Shell to compensate their communities.”
The kidnappers want the largest oil group in the country to make a 1.5 billion dollar payment that they say a federal appeals court ordered it to make to the Ijaw population of neighbouring Bayelsa State, Kuku said.
“The youths are saying Shell is buying time. Our attitude is to appeal to these people to allow justice to take its course”, he told AFP.
Other local politicians questionned whether there was any link between the abducted Filipinos and Shell.
A number of groups, some of them bent on getting ransom money and others making political demands, have stepped up attacks on oil companies and related interests in the Delta recently.
In the past eight days one Italian, five Chinese and nine South Korean hostages have been freed by their respective captors.
But two Italians and one Lebanese national remain in captivity. They were abducted on December 7 by MEND.
As well as more control of the region’s rich resources and compensation for communities affected by pollution, MEND is also demanding the release of former Bayelsa State governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, jailed on corruption charges, as well as separatist leader Mujahid Dokubo-Asari.
The group says it aim to drive all oil companies out of the region and halt Nigeria’s oil production completely.
Nigeria lost more than half a million barrels a day last year to unrest in the region.