Nigeria Content Online

A lawyer standing
for more than 60 militants arrested last month said on Wednesday that
the gang leader and two of his followers were removed from prison by
the secret service last week.

Nigeria’s armed
forces on November 20 arrested ‘Obese’, whose real name is Tamunotonye
Kuna, and more than 60 of his followers who were believed to be behind
the kidnapping of 19 oil and construction workers in the Niger Delta.

Ken Atsuete, legal
council to the arrested militants, said a judge ordered that the
militants be remanded in Port Harcourt Federal Prison on November 29
but last week, officers from Nigeria’s State Security Service (SSS)
took Obese and two of his senior followers to another location. “From
November 29 until December 16, nothing whatsoever happened to these
boys, only for the SSS officers to come to the Port Harcourt Prison on
December 16 to take Obese and his second and third in command away to
an unknown and undisclosed location,” Mr. Atsuete said.

“The whereabouts of
Obese and his second and third in command is unknown while the
remaining 62 have been remanded in the Port Harcourt prison.” The SSS
were not available for comment.

Obese, a former
commander in Nigeria’s main militant group, the Movement for the
Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), was one of those who signed up
for an amnesty brokered last year by late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

Militant groups in
the Niger Delta have said kidnapping and attacks on oil pipelines are
part of a fight for a fairer share of the oil wealth generated in their
backyard.

But the line
between militancy and crime is blurred as gang leaders have grown rich
on the spoils of kidnapping for ransom and the theft of industrial
quantities of oil.

Reuters