Two Nigerian naval guards killed, four foreign workers taken by pirates

A SEARCH is underway for four men kidnapped by pirates who stormed a ship being used by an oil servicing company in the waters off southeastern Nigeria during which two Nigerian naval guards were killed and another two were wounded.

"An oil servicing company was attacked by gunmen," said Commodore Kabir Aliyu. "We lost two of our men and four expatriates were abducted, one Malaysian, one Iranian," adding that a Thai and an Indonesian were also taken. He said the attack took place around 33 nautical miles off the coast of Bonny, Nigeria's main oil export terminal in the Niger Delta area.

The owners of the vessel Jascon, owned by the Dutch Sea Trucks Group, confirmed that four of its staff had been abducted and that two other security guards were also wounded in the attack. The two remaining injured security personnel are now in Port Harcourt hospital.

"Sea Trucks Group is making every effort to find out where the kidnappers are," said company spokeswoman Corrie van Kessel said in a statement.

Security in the area has improved since criminal and guerrilla violence shut down nearly half of Nigeria's oil output around the middle of the last decade, attributed to an amnesty between rebels, criminal gangs and the government, according to Reuters.

But the situation remains volatile and inflamed by organised crime and local political rivalries quarrelling over remuneration from national oil exploitation.

Piracy and kidnapping in the area and offshore are common, and West Africa's oil-rich Gulf of Guinea is second only to the waters off Somalia for the risk of pirate attacks, which drives up insurance costs.

The attacks are viewed more as a criminal enterprise than as anything political. Nigerian pirates usually release kidnapped crew members after their cargo has been looted, rather than holding them for ransom as Somali pirates do.