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Gunmen steal boats from Agip pumping station in southern Nigeria Sun

Posted by AFP on 2006/11/13 | Views: 581 |

Gunmen steal boats from Agip pumping station in southern Nigeria Sun


Unidentified gunmen stole three speedboats from a pumping station operated by Italian oil company Agip in southern Nigeria's restive Niger Delta region, an industry source said.

Unidentified gunmen stole three speedboats from a pumping station operated by Italian oil company Agip in southern Nigeria's restive Niger Delta region, an industry source said.

The armed men stole the boats from the Clough Creek flow station in the southern Bayelsa state.

"There was a robbery there last night. Armed men stole three speedboats belonging to ENI (Agip's parent company)", said the source, who asked to remain anonymous adding: "Nobody was taken hostage and the station was not occupied".

A spokesman for Bayelsa state government, Ekiyor Welson, Sunday confirmed an "incident" took place overnight at the Clough Creek station and said an unspecified number of workers on duty at the station at the time of the attack were "being kept there" by the attackers.

"We're working on it right now. By tomorrow the government will have solved the problem", he said, adding that there were no expatriates among the workers detained.

The industry source said he was "not aware" of any workers being detained at Clough Creek.

The incident occurred as another Agip flowstation in Bayelsa state, Tebidaba, is still occupied by the armed protestors who invaded it on November 6.

Attacks on oil installations, kidnappings of foreigners and sometimes killings of Nigerian oil workers, are carried out by armed groups that claim to be seeking a larger share of the country's oil wealth and jobs for the local community.

Since January, separatists and armed groups seeking benefits from the oil wealth for the Delta's 14-million strong ethnic Ijaw community have been blamed for a spate of violent attacks on multinational oil firms and their personnel.

Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer and world's sixth oil producer, derives more than 95 percent of its foreign exchange earnings from oil.

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