By Tansa Musa
YAOUNDE (Reuters) - Cameroonian authorities searching forsix people abducted by armed pirates near the Nigerian borderfound five mutilated and bullet-riddled bodies, Cameroon'smilitary headquarters said on Sunday.
Cameroon authorities have blamed previous violence in thearea on rebels from Nigeria's oil-producing Niger delta.
Fear of reprisals for the June 9 attack, in which pirateskidnapped five soldiers and a local official, prompted manyNigerians to leave Bakassi, a long-disputed peninsula in theoil-rich Gulf of Guinea.
About 90 percent of Bakassi's population are Nigerianfishermen and their families. Nigeria handed the territory backto Cameroon in 2006 in line with an International Court ofJustice ruling.
Cameroon's military authorities said the pirates openedfire last Monday on a boat transporting the Cameroonianofficial and an eight-man military patrol.
The official and five soldiers were captured while three ofthe soldiers escaped by plunging into the water, including onewho was seriously wounded.
"The mutilated and bullet-riddled corpses were found buriedin the mangroves," Cameroon's military headquarters in thecapital Yaounde said in a statement.
"The bodies are yet to be identified," it said.
Last November Cameroon said it believed Nigerian rebelswere behind a speedboat attack on an army post that left 20Cameroonian soldiers and 10 assailants dead.
The waters off Bakassi are known to contain oil deposits.The peninsula lies just east of the Niger Delta, Nigeria's oilheartland which produces some two-thirds of the hydrocarbonsfrom Africa's leading oil exporter.
The Niger Delta is notoriously unstable, but piracy andseaborne attacks appear to have spread in recent months withattacks on Nigeria's western neighbour Benin and oil-producingEquatorial Guinea to the south of Bakassi.
The United States imports more than 15 percent of its oilneeds from Africa's Gulf of Guinea.
Washington says the region's nearly 2,000 nautical miles ofcoastline are largely unobserved, uncontrolled and vulnerableto "terrorist groups, criminal gangs, or separatist militias."
(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say onthe top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com)
(Writing by Alistair Thomson; Editing by Matthew Jones)
