A Nigerian gang leader died Wednesday from gunshot wounds suffered while in the custody of security forces in the southern oil region where armed forces are targeting militants, police said.
Bayelsa state police Commissioner Onuoha Udoka said Ken Niweigha died when his loyalists attacked a convoy carrying the man to a hideout where he had intended to uncover a weapons cache. The commissioner said Niweigha suffered bullet wounds in the crossfire.
Authorities had announced the slain man’s arrest a day earlier.
The region’s main militant group, Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, alleged in an e-mail that Niweigha had been summarily executed. Officials weren’t immediately available to comment on the charge.
Niweigha, who was convicted of killing 12 police officers in 1999 and broke out of jail in 2005, isn’t among the region’s best-known militant commanders, who have been targeted in recent weeks during the military’s biggest operation in years in the western region of the oil region.
The military has sent troops, helicopters and fighter jets against militant groups in Delta State, but have yet to expand the operation into the other core oil-producing states, where militants say they’re girding for a fight.
Amnesty International says hundreds of people may have died in the violence, including women and children, and activists from a main ethnic group in the region say the military has targeted their people as retribution for allowing the presence of the militants’ camps. The military denies that.
No firm death toll is known since the military considers the waterways and swamps of the oil region a military zone and travel for journalists and aid workers is severely curtailed.
Militants aiming to force the federal government to send more oil-industry funds to their impoverished lands began stepping up their activities in early 2006, bombing pipelines and kidnapping foreign workers. Their activities have trimmed away about one quarter of the daily crude output in Africa’s oil giant, which now pumps about 1.6 million barrels per day.