A Chinese team searched on Saturday for five telecoms workers kidnapped in Nigeria’s southern oil-producing Niger Delta but there was no news on where they were and who was holding them, officials said.
Gunmen broke into the apartment where the Chinese workers were staying in a remote village and forced them away at gunpoint early on Friday. A sixth Chinese man, the workers’ cook, was overlooked by the kidnappers and managed to get away.
Abductions for ransom are common in the Niger Delta, where residents live without electricity, clean water or paved roads alongside Africa’s biggest oil industry.
“We haven’t succeeded yet in finding out who kidnapped them or where they are being held. We haven’t received any demands,” said Wang Lei, political counsellor at the Chinese embassy in Abuja.
Wang said he was on his way to Port Harcourt, the main city in the delta, to join a search team made up of embassy officials and staff from the company that employs the kidnapped men. They were liaising with Nigerian police in the region.
Wang said the men worked for a Chinese telecoms company executing a contract for the Nigerian government in the delta, but he declined to give the name of the firm.
The cook who escaped abduction was still in the delta and was helping the search team with details of what he saw during the attack.
RESIDENTS POOR
The abduction of the five Chinese workers looked like the work of ransom-seekers rather than a politically-motivated kidnapping by one of the delta’s rebel groups, police said.
Such abductions have plagued the Niger Delta for many years but they became more frequent in 2006.
Most hostages are held for a few days in remote, mangrove-lined creeks and then released after their employers and local authorities pay ransoms. But one Briton and one Nigerian were killed last year in separate botched attempts by Nigerian troops to free them.
Three Italians and one Lebanese working for Italian oil company Agip have been held captive in the creeks since they were kidnapped on Dec. 7 by fighters from the rebel Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).
The MEND, like other armed groups in the delta, says it is fighting for local control of oil wealth and for reparations to make up for five decades of oil extraction that has polluted the delta while bringing few benefits to residents.
China has been investing money and labour in Nigerian infrastructure in return for deals on oil drilling rights and supplies of crude. Nigeria, an impoverished nation of 140 million, hopes to make development gains from the relationship.