Militants attack oil well in Nigeria, kill troops

PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria, Oct 2 (Reuters) Nigerian militants in speed boats today attacked a Royal Dutch Shell oil pumping station, killing soldiers and ending a period of relative quiet in the volatile Niger Delta.

An oil industry source said the militants killed five of the 15 soldiers guarding the Cawthorne Channel facility, located in Rivers State in the eastern delta. An army spokesman confirmed soldiers were killed but he did not know the exact number.

No details were immediately available on whether the attack had any impact on production. Shell already has 495,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day shut down at fields it operates in Africa's top oil producer, mostly because of militant attacks.

''About 17 militants attacked our soldiers. The militants came in several boats. They succeeded in sinking two of our boats with soldiers inside,'' said army spokesman Sagir Musa, adding that several injured soldiers had been brought to Port Harcourt, the state capital.

A self-styled Joint Revolutionary Council, which says it represents three militant groups, claimed responsibility for the attack and demanded the release of Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, a jailed militant leader.

''The purpose of this celebration of ability and capability was to prove to the armed forces of the Nigerian state that we can take them on anywhere, anytime and anyhow,'' the Joint Revolutionary Council said in an email to journalists.

However, a spokesman for the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), one of the three groups the council said it represented, wrote in an email to Reuters that the MEND had nothing to do with Monday's attack.

A spokesman for Shell in Lagos said company officials were checking reports of an attack but had no details yet.

WAVE OF ATTACKS A sixth of Nigeria's oil production capacity has been shut down since February following a wave of attacks by MEND.

The outages in the world's eighth biggest exporter of crude have contributed to several spikes in world oil prices.

MEND's last attack on an oil and gas facility was a bloody raid, also in the Cawthorne Channel, in June. It had threatened more attacks in August but those did not materialise.

The Niger Delta was relatively quiet in September after a spate of kidnappings for ransom in August. A total of 18 oil workers were abducted that month in eight separate incidents. One of the hostages was shot dead by troops during a botched attempt to release him, while all the others have been freed.

Violence in the delta is rooted in poverty, corruption and lawlessness. Most inhabitants of the wetlands region, which is almost the size of England, have seen few benefits from five decades of oil extraction that has damaged their environment.

Their resentment towards the oil industry breeds militancy, but other factors such as the struggle for control of a lucrative oil smuggling business and the lure of ransoms also fuel violence.

The Nigerian government has responded to this year's wave of attacks with promises of investment in the delta, but President Olusegun Obasanjo also said in August that the armed forces should meet militants ''force for force''.

Activists in the region say the promises of development are too little, too late, while the president's order has further angered the unemployed, disgruntled youths who feed numerous armed groups across the region.

Reuters SK GC2350