Militants on Saturday blew up strategic gas and crude pipelines belonging to Shell and Agip in an increasingly fierce campaign that has chopped Nigeria’s oil production in half, militants and residents said.
A new militant group, calling itself the Niger Delta Avengers, reported on social media that they had dynamited the trunkline linking the Dutch-British Shell company’s Bonny terminal and the Brass export terminal of Italian company Agip.
Eke-Spiff Erempagamo, a local community leader, confirmed the attack.
Nigeria’s oil production had already fallen from a projected 2.2 million barrels per day to 1.4 million barrels per day before the latest attacks on the oil industry in southern Nigeria, including three within the past week on facilities of US oil firm Chevron. Several companies have evacuated some of their workers.
The Niger Delta Avengers has given the oil companies a deadline of tomorrow to leave Nigeria’s southern, oil-producing Niger Delta.
“Watch out, something big is about to happen and it will shock the whole world,” the Avengers said on Saturday, addressing international and indigenous oil companies and Nigeria’s military.
Community leaders and activists have sided with the militants, saying residents of the Niger Delta support their demands for a greater share of the country’s oil wealth.
The militants have also expressed anger that the Nigerian government is winding down a 2009 amnesty program that had paid 30,000 militants to help guard installations they once attacked.
The government has deployed thousands of soldiers to defend oil installations.
The militant group on Friday announced that they had blown up a state-owned gas and crude trunkline, adding that it was “heavily guarded by the military.”
Thousands of civilians have fled the fallout from the military campaign, though the Nigerian Army denies reports that uninvolved civilians have been killed.
Supporters of the government and the southern-based opposition party are accusing each other of funding the Avengers.
This year’s renewed campaign targeting the oil industry in the Niger Delta have caused Nigeria to lose its position as Africa’s largest oil producer, with Angola having taken the leading role since March.
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