Nigeria’s main militant group said on Sunday it had attacked three oil installations belonging to Royal Dutch Shell in the Niger Delta, widening a month-old offensive against Africa’s biggest energy industry.
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) said in an e-mailed statement it had attacked Shell pipelines at Adamakiri and Kula, both in Rivers state in the eastern Niger Delta, in the early hours of Sunday morning.
It said it had also attacked the Afremo offshore oilfields, which it believed were operated by Shell, and which it said were 23km from an export terminal through which crude oil from Shell’s Forcados fields is pumped.
Shell said it was investigating reports of attacks against its installations at three locations and was carrying out fly-overs to try to assess any impact on output or the extent of any environmental damage from potential spillage.
A senior industry source said the third attack was not thought to have been on a deepwater installation, but on a facility located in or close to the mangrove creeks, where pipelines and equipment run across broad stretches of water.
The attacks are the first to strike Rivers state, the easternmost of the three main states in the Niger Delta, since the militants launched their latest campaign of sabotage following a military offensive in the western delta last month.
MEND attacks by over the past three years have cut oil output in the world’s eighth biggest crude oil exporter to less than two thirds of its installed capacity of 3 million barrels per day.
Industry and security experts say it is virtually impossible to prevent opportunistic attacks on hundreds of kilometers of pipeline and equipment in the remote mangrove creeks of the Niger Delta.
“The militants are going about attacking pipelines in isolated parts of the creeks where they know they will not encounter resistance,” said Colonel Rabe Abubakar, spokesman for the joint military taskforce in the Niger Delta.
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