A unit of the Nigerian army said its men repelled a militant attack on a facility operated by US oil giant Chevron in the oil-rich Niger delta in the early hours yesterday.
Lieutenant-Colonel Musa Sagir, a spokesman for the Joint Task Force (JTF), the army unit tasked with policing the Niger Delta, said militants attacked the facility at Robertkiri in the southern Rivers State.
“We successfully repelled the attack and there were no casualties on our side,” he said.
There was no immediate comment from Chevron.
In a separate incident in Rivers on Saturday evening a cycle taxi rider rescued a Lebanese national working for a dredging company from an attempted kidnapping, Sagir said.
Earlier on Saturday the region’s most prominent armed group said the army had launched a “full-scale” offensive on its positions and that 27 hostages had been caught up in the fighting.
“At about 9am on Saturday ... the armed forces of Nigeria began a full scale aerial and marine offensive on the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta [MEND] positions and neighboring Ijaw communities in Rivers state,” MEND said in a statement.
“All MEND positions in the Niger delta will respond to this unprovoked attack,” the militant group said.
It went on to warn that oil companies should move their workers out of the delta “within the next 24 hours because a hurricane is about to sweep through oil installations in the entire Niger Delta region.”
“This may be the beginning of a full-scale oil war,” MEND said.
The group has issued such warnings in the past, but, while continuing its kidnappings and sabotage operations, the group has never escalated its activities so significantly.
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