Scottish oil workers recount ordeal

ABERDEEN - Three of four Scots oil workers kidnapped in Nigeria this month have told how they were held by armed guards for almost three weeks, beaten with machetes and told they were to be killed as "sacrifices".

Graeme Buchan, 30, Paul Smith, 32, and Sandy Cruden, 45, from Inverurie, who were reunited with their families yesterday in Aberdeen, were among seven men, including George McLean, 43, from Elgin, seized from the Exxon Mobil compound in Port Harcourt on October 3.

They were taken on an eight-hour speedboat journey into the Niger Delta swamps and held in a makeshift camp under tarpaulins as the kidnappers demanded a £21 million ransom. At one point, Buchan had a gun held to his head and was forced to phone his company, Aberdeen-based Sparrows Offshore Ltd, and say Smith had died. The false information was relayed to Smith's family.

Buchan said the seven men - the Scots, plus a Romanian, Malaysian and Indonesian, who were all released on Sunday - had been sitting with friends in a bar when the gang ran in. Two Nigerian security men were killed in the gunfight. "After 10 days they started to get panicky. We were split up and beaten with sticks, slapped with machetes."

Their lowest point came when their captors told them they were going to a festival to be sacrificed.

- INDEPENDENT