Two Filipinos rescued

He said the Filipino hostages were freed by police at the Elelenwo waterfront on the outskirts of Port Harcourt. The two men spent around four hours in captivity.

Ogbaudu said they were sailors on the MV Seacor, a vessel anchored off Port Harcourt.

An industry source had earlier said they were employees of West Africa Offshore, a drilling company based in Port Harcourt.

Earlier, Nigerian gunmen abducted six Russians in a raid on an expatriate compound that left a Nigerian driver dead, in the latest in a spate of kidnappings in the country’s oil-rich south.

“Early this morning, gunmen burst into the compound on two minibuses near the ALSCON factory and kidnapped six factory employees, Russian citizens,” Russia’s ambassador to Nigeria, Igor Melikhov was quoted as saying by Interfax.

“A Nigerian driver was shot dead” in the raid in the southern state of Akwa Ibom, he told fellow agency ITAR-TASS. “One can say the kidnapping was most probably carried out for a ransom.”

The Russian ambassador demanded that the Nigerian authorities “take urgent measures to obtain the liberation of the (Russian) citizens.”

Moscow-based Russian aluminium company RUSAL said in a statement that the attack was on a residential compound in Ikot Abasi town in southeastern Akwa Ibom State, where it recently took over the management of the Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria (ALSCON).

Before these two latest attacks, at least 11 foreigners were taken hostage by unidentified groups in the oil-rich Niger Delta in the space of 24 hours, bringing to around 50 the number of expatriates kidnapped since May 1.

Late on Friday gunmen kidnapped four foreign workers from the premises of oil services company Schlumberger in southern Nigeria’s oil capital Port Harcourt, police said. Diplomats said the men included Dutch, French, British and Pakistani nationals.

Earlier Friday, a group of Indians — three senior expatriate staff and two women and two children from the same family — were seized in a pre-dawn raid from the residential compound of chemical company Indorama, also in the southern Rivers State.

Since the start of 2006, when the number of kidnappings began to rise sharply in the Niger Delta, some 190 expatriates have been seized. Most have been released unharmed after a few days or a few weeks.

The kidnappers are a mixture of militant groups capable of carrying out daring raids on deepwater oil facilities, members of disgruntled local communities and criminal gangs out to make ransom money.

Dozens of Filipinos have been abducted since the start of the year in southern Nigeria, but few, if any, of the most recent kidnappings in the region have involved Russian citizens.

Last month gunmen kidnapped a Belarussian woman working for a catering company in southern Nigeria’s oil capital Port Harcourt.

She was released later the same month. It was not clear whether her abductors had received all or part of the 1.2 million-dollar (880,000-euro) ransom that RIA Novosti news agency had said they had demanded.

Both the Nigerian government and companies systematically deny paying ransoms but the recent increase in kidnappings that appear devoid of any political agenda suggests that kidnappers often do receive such payments.

Nigeria’s new president Umaru Yar’Adua, who was sworn in last week, has vowed to make the unrest in the south of the country one of his top priorities.

A summit meeting on the subject he had initially convened for Monday was however postponed indefinitely after participants asked for more time to prepare.