(Reuters) – Nigerian troops and gangsters fought gun battles in the oil city of Port Harcourt on Thursday, killing an undisclosed number of people, army and security sources said.
The army launched a dawn raid on several criminal hide-outs after six days of street battles between rival gangs last week, and the gangs responded by staging an armed assault on the state government headquarters in the centre of town.
“It is mayhem here. There is a gun battle outside government house right now,” said a security source, who is not allowed to talk to the media. “They are threatening to move on to the central police station,” he added.
Rival gangs fought street battles for six days last week in a turf war that killed at least a dozen people and shut down most commercial activity in the sprawling, industrial city. The fighting had stopped since Sunday.
“This morning we launched an operation aimed at flushing out the bad boys who have regrouped within the city,” said Sagir Musa, spokesman for the Joint Task Force, a military unit responsible for security in the oil producing Niger Delta.
“We attacked them by surprise. They responded and there was some resistance but we have broken them. We arrested some of them and killed some of them,” he said, declining to provide numbers.
Violence in Nigeria’s oil heartland surged early last year when armed groups protesting against neglect and corruption in the impoverished delta started blowing up pipelines and oil wells and kidnapping foreign oil workers.
CRIME WAVE
Their attacks shut down at least a fifth of crude output from Nigeria, the world’s eighth biggest exporter, pushing up oil prices on international markets and forcing thousands of foreigners to leave the delta.
But over time the violence shifted from targeted attacks on the oil industry into a crime wave. Hundreds of kidnappings for ransom have taken place as well as armed robberies and deadly gang wars.
The army has blamed two rival militia leaders, Ateke Tom and Soboma George, for last week’s fighting in Port Harcourt.
But human rights activists have said that like many militias in the delta, these men were at various times sponsored by politicians who used them to rig elections or scare opponents.
Activists say politicians’ use of unemployed youths as hired thugs is one of the factors behind rising violence in the delta. The last polls were in April.
Tom and George used to be part of the same group until they fell out and George joined a faction of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), one of the more active rebel groups in the delta.
George was briefly detained on Jan. 28 but at least 50 MEND fighters invaded the area of Port Harcourt where he was held, attacked troops with machine guns and grenades, torched police headquarters and freed George and 125 other suspects. (Additional reporting by Tom Ashby in Lagos