Several killed in Nigerian militant oil attack

LAGOS, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Several people were killed when suspected ethnic militants stormed a Nigerian oil platform on Sunday, extending a three-week spate of attacks which has hit output in the world's eighth largest exporter.

Heavily armed men invaded Royal Dutch Shell's Benisede oil flow station in six speed boats, exchanged fire with troops, torched two housing blocks, damaged oil processing facilities and left, authorities said.

Some attackers and some soldiers protecting the platform were killed in the gunfire, a top military official said.

"There was an attack. There was a fight there, an exchange of fire," Brigadier-General Elias Zamani, who heads a military task force in the southern delta, told Reuters by telephone.

"We lost some soldiers and some of the other boys were killed also."

A diplomat said recent attacks and kidnappings targeting Nigeria's oil industry appear to be coordinated by one militant group with up to 500 members which has demanded a greater share of oil revenue for the Niger Delta and the release of two ethnic Ijaw leaders.

Shell evacuated Benisede and three other flow stations after Sunday's attack, but oil output was unaffected because they were already closed after militants blew up a major crude oil pipeline nearby last Wednesday, the company said.

However, Sunday's attack may delay repairs to the 100,000 barrel-a-day Trans-Ramos pipeline, which had been expected to resume pumping to the Forcados tanker terminal on Monday or Tuesday, a senior industry source said.

"This incident may delay repair work on the pipeline so it may mean a prolonged outage," the official told Reuters, adding that workers were likely to be evacuated from the affected area.

The firefight occurred as a team of government negotiators began talking to militants holding four foreign oil workers hostage in the delta after abducting them from an offshore oilfield operated by Shell on Wednesday.

The contract workers -- an American, Briton, Bulgarian and Honduran -- were being held in the Agoro district of Bayelsa state, in the south of the country, a government spokesman said.

MILITARY DEPLOYMENT

Bayelsa State Governor Jonathan Goodluck ordered his deputy, who hails from the region of mangrove swamps and tidal creeks, to lead a team there to help secure their release.

"Any community that allows its land to be used by criminals will be sanctioned and the military may be deployed to that place," spokesman Ekiyor Conrad Welson quoted the governor as saying.

"We are hopeful that within two days we should be able to sort out the situation," he added.

Colleagues of the captive workers said they feared a heavy-handed military response could endanger their lives.

"With the human shield the militants have, such a high-handed approach could lead to disaster," said one.

In an email statement on Thursday, a previously unknown group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, said all westerners, especially Britons and Americans, were legitimate targets. It said it was not interested in a ransom and threatened more attacks on Nigeria's oil industry.

The group demanded the release of Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, an Ijaw militia leader who faces treason charges, and Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, a former delta governor who was impeached last month for money laundering.

"We are capable and determined to destroy the ability of Nigeria to export oil," the statement said.

The attacks coincide with a period of elevated political tension in Nigeria as a whole, and the delta in particular.

Powerful figures in the ruling party are jostling for position ahead of elections in 2007, and the competition has already turned bloody in some cases.

Thousands of troops have been stationed in the vast delta since 2003 when Ijaw militancy in the run-up to elections forced companies to shut 40 percent of the OPEC member nation's output.