LAGOS (AFP) — A Nigerian militant group said it had attacked an oil pipeline run by Royal Dutch Shell Monday and killed 11 soldiers in the main producing region of Africa's biggest oil exporter.
The raid by the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND), one of the main separatist groups in the region, came four days after the army said it had thwarted an attack on another Shell facility in the strategic region.
The Nigerian military confirmed an explosion near a flow station but denied having lost any men.
Shell confirmed an attack on its Nembe Creek trunk line at Awoba in Rivers state and said production had been affected but declined to say by how much.
It added that a flyover had revealed that some oil had spilled.
"We have mobilised equipment to contain a further spread of oil," a company spokesman said. "We have also shut-in some production to stop a further spill."
MEND said in a statement that it had sabotaged a "major trunk pipeline" in Rivers.
The group also said its fighters sank a military gunboat that opened fire on them after the attack.
"We flanked them in a counter-attack and killed in close combat all the drunken soldiers numbering 11... before using dynamite to sink the gunboat with its dead occupants."
MEND emerged in 2006 as the leader of groups calling for a greater share of Nigeria's oil revenue for the Delta region. It has carried out a series of deadly attacks in recent months and also kidnapped local and expatriate workers.
The guerrillas said Monday's attack was "dedicated" to President Umaru Yar'Adua who is marking one year in office. They said the government has failed "to ensure peace, security and reconciliation in the Niger Delta region."
MEND said the soldiers were drunk and had gang-raped two adolescent girls, saying that before sinking the boat, the fighters collected the soldiers' weapons, ammunition and bullet-proof vests.
A Nigerian army spokesmen at first denied the pipeline attack and a Shell spokesman, Precious Okolobo, would only say: "We're investigating. We can't make any comment yet."
A senior Shell official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said bad weather had stopped the company from sending helicopters to check the zone where the attack was claimed.
But Lieutenant Colonel Musa Sagir, spokesman for the Joint Task Force (JTF) which assures security in the oil region, told AFP that a pipeline near the Awoba flowstation had "exploded in the early hours."
Awoba is about 40 kilometres (25 miles) south-west of Port Harcourt, the main oil city in the Niger Delta.
"The cause of the explosion is not yet verified. But we suspect that explosives might have been used by miscreants to carry out the explosion," Sagir added.
He denied, however, that 11 soldiers had been killed.
Royal Dutch Shell said on May 10 that it was losing the equivalent of 30,000 barrels of crude oil per day because of recent attacks against its installations.
It has twice this year declared "force majeure" for its Bonny terminal in the Niger Delta, allowing it to suspend its contractual obligations without paying penalties.
The Nigerian military said last Thursday that it had thwarted an attack on Shell's Alakiri flow station, killing two guerrillas.
The unrest has helped drive international oil prices to a record highs.
A fuel pipeline exploded and caused fire Monday at a depot in Mosimi, about 60 kilometres (35 miles) northeast of Lagos, private AIT television reported.
No life was lost in the explosion blamed on vandals who had attempted to steal fuel to re-sell on the black market, the television station said, showing footage of the inferno and the damaged pipeline.
Nigeria is officially the world's eighth-largest oil exporter but over the past two years its production has been cut by a quarter to about 2.1 million barrels a day because of the insurgent attacks.
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