An armed separatist group in southern Nigeria has said that one of four foreign oil workers taken hostage had been ill but was recovering and had received medical treatment.
Roberto Dieghi, a 64-year-old Italian, had fallen ill “but seems to be getting better”, his captors in the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) said in an email to AFP Monday.
Dieghi was kidnapped along with fellow Italians Francesco Arena and Cosma Russo and a Lebanese, Imad Saliba, when MEND on December 7 attacked an oil installation owned by Italy’s Agip at Brass in Nigeria’s Bayelsa State.
The MEND statement said Dieghi had been given medical care and medication, but came in the wake of an email to AFP on Sunday reaffirming the movement’s hard line against oil companies active in the delta, where it claims to be acting for the local community that derives little benefit from oil revenues.
The Italian daily Corriere della Sera on Monday reported on its website that MEND had requested a doctor to tend to one of the oil workers, without naming him, because he was “seriously ill”.
“One of the Italian hostages is seriously ill and we are giving permission to a doctor from the Red Cross or Doctors without Borders (MSF) to come and see him,” the paper quoted MEND as saying in an email late on Sunday.
The email message was signed by a certain “Jomo Gbomo, a pseudonym used, at his own admission, by the leader of the group,” the website said.
The Italian foreign ministry was trying to establish the authenticity of the newspaper’s email on Monday, the Ansa news agency said.
Since kidnapping the four, the MEND has released their photographs to the media and stepped up attacks on Italian Agip and Anglo-Dutch Shell facilities in Rivers and Bayelsa States.
The movement has stated that it will not accept a ransom to free the four, but instead demands that Nigerian authorities free former Bayelsa State governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, jailed on corruption charges, separatist leader Mujahid Dokubo-Asari and other detainees from the Niger delta.
The MEND is demanding a larger share for southern Nigerians in oil revenues, which account for almost all the country’s foreign exchange income, with compensation for communities affected by oil pollution.