Police recover bodies of missing NNPC engineers in Ogun

After a four-week search, a police special task force, at the weekend, recovered bullet-ridden bodies of three missing Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) engineers, who were attacked by oil pipeline vandals in Arepo village, Ogun State.

The slain NNPC officials were identified as a Deputy Manager in charge of Pipelines Right of Way (PROW) and two other engineers deployed to effect repairs on a vandalised pipeline in Arepo on September 5.

According to Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Friday Ibadin, who heads the Inspector-General of Police Special Task Force on Anti-Pipeline Vandalism, officers who were using speedboats and helicopters to comb the creeks near Arepo dug up the bodies in two shallow graves across a river.

Ibadin said: “We found, in a decomposing state, bullet-ridden bodies of the three victims. We learnt that the body of the local security guard employed by NNPC, Taye aka Dead Man, was cut into pieces and disposed off.”

Authorities at NNPC have blamed the ongoing fuel shortage in some parts of the country on the shutdown of the damaged System 2B pipeline, at Arepo, which carries one third of the nation's daily fuel needs.

The acting Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs Division of NNPC, Mr. Fidel Pepple, had said that the major pipeline was evacuating about nine to 11 million litres of fuel from Lagos to Ibadan, Ilorin and the North.

Pepple said that a team of engineers and technicians of the Pipelines and Product Marketing Company (PPMC), a subsidiary of NNPC, who had been dispatched to the ruptured products pipeline site, had successfully put out the fire by ensuring a complete cut-off of product supply to the pipeline from the Atlas Cove depot, and the team was on the verge of gaining access to the damaged point to commence proper assessment of the scope of work when the vandals who had laid ambush opened fire from a distance, killing the three staff members and injuring several others.

Ibadin, who spoke in Lagos yesterday, added: “Shortly after the incident, the Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Abubakar, reconstituted the dissolved Anti vandal team. It became important to get to the root of the incident that led to the death of these NNPC officials. And in the cause of investigation, about six suspects were arrested. We gathered from the confession of one of the suspects, Imerepamu Ijebu Joel, that he knew where the NNPC staffers were buried.

“Initially, he took our team to a spot and after several hours, the bodies were not found. At night, the Ijaw boys attempted to dig one spot, but he was stopped by the police who were on guard. And two days later he opened up and agreed to take us to the real spot.

“It took six hours of sailing to get to the spot. We had 40 heavily armed men, and we took along a pathologist, a coroner, and the medical team from NNPC that eventually identified the bodies. They took us to a place where they claimed they bury non natives. With the assistance of one John Bosco, Peter Opidi, and the suspect Imerepamu Ijebu Joel, we were shown two shallow graves.

“It was there that we discovered the bodies and they have been deposited at a mortuary.

“I wish to commend the gallantry of the sector commander, DSP Onaghise Osayande and his team who dared the dangers of the creek to recover the bodies. Meanwhile, we are carrying out further investigations to see if there was more to the killings than what we had gathered.”

In March 2008 a pipeline explosion, in the same village, killed the Deputy Area Manager in charge of Maintenance at the Mosimi depot.

Three other senior NNPC officials were also severely burnt.

In June 2009, NNPC’s oil pipeline in Ilado, a Lagos suburb, also exploded leaving scores injured. Eleven boats that belonged to the vandals were razed.

The evening explosion damaged the pipeline transporting refined products from the corporation’s Atlas Cove depot to Mosimi depot, from where products are distributed to users in parts of Ogun, Ondo and the North.