By Tansa Musa
YAOUNDE (Reuters) - A Cameroonian official and five soldiers were ambushed and abducted by pirates on the Bakassi frontier with Nigeria in a fresh attack in the oil producing Gulf of Guinea, authorities said on Wednesday.
Cameroon's armed forces said the attack took place on Monday at Mbenmong on the long-disputed Bakassi peninsula, which Nigeria handed back to Cameroon in 2006 in line with an International Court of Justice ruling.
A sub-prefect from Kombo-Abedimo was among those abducted after the boat in which he was travelling with an eight-man Cameroonian military patrol was fired on as it approached the fishing settlement.
"Heavily-armed pirates on the shore opened a hail of fire onto the boat," the Cameroonian military statement said.
Three of the soldiers, one badly wounded, were able to dive into the water. The six other occupants of the boat, believed to be wounded, were seized by the attackers along with the vessel and their weapons, the statement added.
Effiong Effiong, a former secretary of local government when Bakassi was under Nigerian control, said there were reports the missing Cameroonians, including the sub-prefect, had been killed. But there was no official confirmation of this.
In November, more than 20 Cameroonian soldiers were killed and on the Bakassi peninsula when gunmen travelling by speedboat attacked their post. Cameroon said its forces killed around 10 of the assailants, whom it described then as suspected members of a militant group from Nigeria.
Westwards from Bakassi lies Nigeria's oil producing Niger Delta, the hydrocarbons heartland of Africa's leading oil exporter, ranked eighth in the world. Bakassi is also known to contain offshore oil deposits.
Niger Delta militants who say they want more of the region's huge oil wealth to be used for the benefit of local people have stepped up attacks on oil installations and army posts.
Earlier this week, gunmen in speedboats killed a contractor working for Canada's Addax Petroleum in successive attacks on oil supply and security vessels in southeast Nigeria.
PIRACY
Cameroon said its security forces were investigating Monday's attack, which it called the attack an act of piracy.
"These attacks linked to international terrorism are becoming more and more frequent in African maritime areas, notably off Somalia and the Gulf of Guinea," the armed forces statement said.
Other Gulf of Guinea states including Equatorial Guinea and Benin have seen similar attacks in the last six months.
The United States, which imports more than 15 percent of its oil needs from the region, says the gulf's nearly 2,000 nautical miles of coast are largely unobserved, uncontrolled and vulnerable to "terrorist groups, criminal gangs, or separatist militias".
The Gulf of Guinea's share of U.S. oil imports is expected to increase to more than 25 percent by 2015 and the U.S. military has created a new Africa Command (AFRICOM) to increase its security footprint on the world's poorest continent,
U.S. Navy and Coastguard vessels have stepped up patrols and visits along Africa's West Coast to increase maritime safety, bolster cooperation with local navies and offer them training.
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