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LAGOS, Nigeria: Authorities here paraded 15 Filipinos arrested last
week for allegedly stealing crude oil from the country’s oil-rich
Niger Delta, a military spokesman said Friday.
“The Filipinos were shown to journalists in
Effurun, near Warri, yesterday,” the Joint Task Force spokesman,
Major Omale Ochagwuba, told Agence France-Presse.
The Filipinos were arrested in a foreign vessel,
MT Lina Panama, laden with stolen crude at Brass as they attempted
to leave Nigerian territorial waters.
The independent newspaper The Nation showed the
photograph of the Filipinos in its Friday edition.
The paper quoted Rev Chavez, the ship’s
captain, as saying they knew nothing about the stolen crude, and
that they were in fact victims of attack by suspected pirates in the
region.
Chavez said they were on their way to Angola
from Cotonou, the capital of Benin, when they were attacked.
“On July 10, at about nine in the morning at
somewhere close to the mouth of River Niger, two suspicious boats
attacked us and the youth hauled themselves onto the vessel with
ropes and tried to stop the vessel,” he said.
“We had nothing in the mouth of the river,
because were only passing by when the youth attacked us. We were in
the room where they locked us up for several hours before we were
rescued by Nigerian armed forces who took us out of the cabin,” he
added.
The stealing of crude oil from the Niger Delta
by armed gangs, pirates and their foreign collaborators costs
Nigeria millions of dollars in lost revenue every year.
-- AFP
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