http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/world/africa/02nigeria.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
By LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: January 2, 2008
DAKAR, Senegal — Coordinated assaults on two police stations, a hotel and a restaurant early Tuesday killed at least 10 people, the authorities said, shattering a brief New Year's Day calm in the violent and oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria.
At least four police officers were among the dead, along with several of the attackers, who were believed to be members of a street gang known as the Niger Delta Vigilante, police officials said. A security guard at the Presidential Hotel, a popular haunt of government officials in Port Harcourt, was killed as gunmen sprayed assault rifle fire at the lobby.
The gang is one of several heavily armed, violent groups, known in Nigeria as cults, that have played havoc on the streets of Port Harcourt, the capital of Nigeria's oil industry, in recent years.
The Niger Delta has always been a violent place, and militant groups have been trying for years, using tactics like kidnappings of foreign oil workers and bombings of oil production facilities, to force the government to hand a bigger share of the country's oil wealth over to the region that produces it. Despite pumping out an average of more than 2 million barrels of oil a day, the Niger Delta is one of the poorest and least developed parts of Nigeria, Africa's biggest oil producer and most populous country.
The gangs believed responsible for much of the recent violence, including the Tuesday attacks, are separate from the politically motivated militant groups but arose out of the same miasma of corrupt misrule that has characterized the region for decades. They have different leaders and aims, but share some of the same members, weapons and patrons.
The gangs have been fighting among themselves and against the country's security forces for dominance on the streets of Port Harcourt and the attentions of politicians, who have in the past two elections in Nigeria used the gangs as private militias to rig elections and provide security.
