Nigerian Militants Say British Hostage `Very Ill`

MEND said a few weeks later it had `rescued` all of them from their original captors.

Nigerian militants who have been holding two British oil workers hostage in the creeks of the Niger Delta for five months said on Friday one of the men was seriously ill.

"One of the British hostages in our custody has contracted a strange sickness and happens to be very ill," the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) said in an emailed statement.

"A local doctor has been arranged to review his condition and we hope the situation can be stabilised," it said.

MEND has named the men as Robin Barry Hughes and Matthew John Maguire, but it did not say which of them was sick.

The two Britons were first kidnapped on Sept. 9 with two South Africans, a Ukrainian and more than 20 Nigerians when their oil supply vessel was hijacked off the coast of the Niger Delta, home to Africa's biggest oil and gas industry.

MEND said a few weeks later it had "rescued" all of them from their original captors. It has since released the South Africans, the Ukrainian and the Nigerians but said it was holding on to the Britons as "leverage".

The group has said in the past it will hold the men until Henry Okah, the leader of MEND who is on trial for gun-running and treason, is released. Okah's lawyers say he is in urgent need of medical treatment for a kidney ailment.

"MEND will follow the example of the Nigerian government by managing (the sick hostage's) health conditions locally like is being done in Henry Okah's case," the group said.

More than 200 foreigners have been kidnapped in the Niger Delta since MEND launched a campaign of violent sabotage against the oil industry three years ago to push for what it considers to be a fairer share of oil profits.

Most have been released unharmed, although some have fallen ill with diseases such as malaria after being held for weeks in the militants' makeshift camps, nestled in the mangrove swamps that make up some of the world's most extensive wetlands.