A crew member of a Cosco ship was severely beaten by bandits in Nigeria as the alarming rise in incidents of piracy in the region continues.



Norway’s BW Offshore has, however, said reports that one of its vessels was set upon in the area this week are slightly wide of the mark.

The 18,300-dwt Feng Shun Shan (built 1985), operated by Cosco Shipping Co Ltd (Coscol), was boarded by robbers at Lagos port on Wednesday night, China’s Xinhua reported.



“About 22:00 hours on Wednesday, four armed men came with a flying boat and used their rope to come on board the vessel,” Babatunde Joseph of GMT Shipping Nigeria told the state-owned news agency.



Although no shots were fired in the 15-minute ordeal, the duty officer was “severely beaten” and had to be taken to hospital, the report claims. The attackers made off with a small amount of equipment from the China-flagged multi-purpose vessel.



The incident at the commercial capital’s port follows a recent spate of attacks on ships further east in Nigeria and Cameroon which have led to numerous kidnappings.



In one incident reports suggest that BW’s floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) ship Sendje Berge (built 1974) came under attack south of Bonny Island in the early hours of Wednesday morning. A spokesperson for the ship’s operator, BW Offshore, told TradeWinds, however, that there was no such attack. Crew had spotted a number of suspicious boats coming alongside the vessel but no shots were fired and no bandits boarded the ship.



On Tuesday night three French crew members were abducted from the 120-tbp Bourbon Alexandre (built 2005) near the mouth of the Bonny River. TradeWinds reported on Thursday that around the same time and in the same area a Thai crew member was snatched from the pipe-laying vessel Jascon 30 (built 2007). All three are still being held.



Recently two crew members were kidnapped from a Jan de Nul ships near Cameroon’s Douala port at the same time that four more were taken from a Ukrainian vessel in the area. All six are believed to be currently held in Nigeria.



One knowledgeable source speculated that a former lieutenant of a once major figure in now-defunct militia group Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) may be behind the recent surge in attacks. The former close allay of Farah Dagogo is believed to have been behind the abductions of 12 crew members from the 7,500-dwt BBC Polonia (built 2010) near Bonny Island in July.