[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Two helicopters carried out the air attacks on Perezouweikoregene community near the oil town of Warri on Wednesday afternoon, community spokesman Perezouweikore Ebiwei told reporters. “The helicopters just arrived in the community and started shooting,” Ebiwei said. “We don’t know what we have done to warrant the attack.”

One person had an arm cut off by shrapnel and six people are missing, he added.

Major Said Hammed, spokesman for a joint army, navy and air task force charged with security in the volatile Niger Delta, confirmed that military helicopters had been in action in the area but said they were targeting barges used by criminal gangs to tap crude oil from pipelines. “Helicopters on routine patrol in the area sighted the barges being used to steal oil and fired to put them out of use.”

Nigeria estimates that at times as much as 10 percent of its daily output of 2.5 million barrels is stolen from pipelines by gangs who sell the crude illegally to vessels waiting offshore. Security agencies believe the trade finances weapons used by gangsters and ethnic militants active in the region.

The army helicopter attack this week prompted a militant group to warn that it has the means to shoot down aircraft. The group, calling itself the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), in a statement accused Royal Dutch Shell of providing its airstrip in Warri as the staging post for helicopter attacks. “We are very well capable of shooting down aircraft landing and taking off from this airstrip and may consider doing so,” the group said.

Tension has been particularly high in the delta since early January when MEND kidnapped foreign oil workers and attacked several oil facilities. MEND freed the four hostages after 19 days, during which President Olusegun Obasanjo’s refused their demands to free detained leaders of the Ijaw ethnic group, the biggest tribe in the delta.

MEND claims to be fighting for greater local control of oil wealth, and accuses Obasanjo of continuing oppression by a succession of governments that has left the region among the poorest in Nigeria despite its oil wealth.

[ENDS]