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97 hostages nigeria oil rig { April 30 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.sunspot.net/news/nationworld/bal-te.nigeria30apr30,0,1525979.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlineshttp://www.sunspot.net/news/nationworld/bal-te.nigeria30apr30,0,1525979.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines
97 people held hostage in Nigeria
Oil workers' captives include 21 Americans
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Associated Press
Originally published April 30, 2003
LAGOS, Nigeria - Striking Nigerian oil workers have seized 97 hostages, including 21 Americans, on several offshore oil rigs, officials said yesterday. Some captives said they feared that armed rescue attempts would end in disaster.
Reports conflicted about whether the hostages had been threatened. One wrote an e-mail saying that the hostage-takers warned they would blow up the rigs if attacked, but oil officials dismissed reports that any oil workers had been threatened and said the strikers appeared willing to give up.
The rigs, owned by Transocean, a company based in Houston, were drilling wells for oil multinationals Royal/Dutch Shell and TotalFinaElf.
"Make no mistake of the danger we're in," one hostage said in an e-mail read by Jake Molloy, general secretary of the Offshore Industry Liaison Committee, a labor union based in Aberdeen, Scotland, that has members among the hostages. "If they have lost everything, they will make sure we lose everything. And that means our lives." In addition to the Americans, 35 Britons are being held hostage, Western diplomats said.
A British hostage told his wife yesterday that the hostage-takers were threatening to blow up the rigs if anyone tried to storm them, Molloy said.
But the woman, whom Molloy declined to identify for safety reasons, said her husband did not believe the strikers had explosives. Molloy did not know whether the strikers had guns, although he said hostages said their captors were armed with the installations' firefighting axes.
Nigeria is one of the world's largest oil exporters and the fifth-largest producer of U.S. oil imports. Sabotage and hostage-takings by community activists, labor groups and thugs are relatively common in the Niger Delta, where nearly all of Nigeria's oil is drilled. Hostages rarely are harmed.
About 100 hostage-takers, who work on the rigs, have been holding the workers since April 19. But it was not immediately clear why the hostage-takings were not announced until yesterday.
Transocean announced April 22 that a strike had begun but did not mention captive workers. In the past, other oil companies have preferred to deal with such crises out of the glare of media coverage.
The strikers were protesting a decision by Transocean to use boats instead of helicopters to ferry them from the rigs, which are about 25 miles off the shore of Rivers, a restive Niger Delta state, said Joseph Akinlaja, secretary-general of Nigeria's largest oil workers union.
Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun
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