Galmudug State Minister blamed the international navies for the loss of civilian lives and fishing boats and demanded an apology.

Fourteen Iranian fishermen who were stranded along the Somali Indian Ocean coast after an attack, have been moved to the capital of semi-autonomous Galmudug state.

The Iranians were moved Friday to Galkayo town, about 750 km north of Mogadishu.

The seamen were stranded at Hobyo, a coastal town, 660km northeast of Mogadishu, where their fishing boat was reportedly attacked on Wednesday and Thursday by helicopter gunships from the international navy warships patrolling the Somali coast against pirates.

Mr Abdiweli Hassan Hersi, the Police Commander in Hobyo, told Radio Mogadishu, a state run broadcaster, that all the fishermen were in good conditions, except two who were slightly wounded.

“The Iranian boat that was anchored there was attacked by three choppers for the second time in two days, forcing the Iranians to swim to the shore,” said the Hobyo police boss.

“Three Somalis died in the incident as two bodies were found at the beach,” he added.

According to the locals, the Iranian fishing boat sunk after being set ablaze by the fire from the choppers.

Galmudug Authority’s minster for Fisheries and Marine Resources Mohamed Ali Gurey, condemned the operations carried out by the international navy for victimising civilians.

The minister blamed the international navies for the loss of civilian lives and fishing boats and demanded an apology.

Muktar Haji
Mrmuhagi@gmail.cm

GALMUDUG STATE CONDEMNS FOREIGN SHIPS SMASHING POOR FISHERMEN BOAT

An Iranian was among three suspected pirates wounded after foreign warships in the Indian Ocean attacked a boat off Somalia’s coastal town of Hobyo, Galmudug State Wednesday afternoon, witnesses said on Friday.


At least three suspected Somali pirates were also slain in the raid conducted by a helicopter of unknown origin, according to Bashir Abdi Guled, a fisherman in Hobyo, a town about 500 kilometers (300 miles) northeast of the capital Mogadishu.

“An Iranian citizen, who I think was fisherman, and two Somalis wounded in the raid were taken a medical facility in the town for treatment,” Guled told All Headline News by phone, adding that all Somalis killed or wounded in the raid were fishermen.

Guled noted that early Thursday morning, a helicopter and three skiffs mounted with heavy and light guns attacked the same place, this time tearing down the boat used by the suspected pirates. No casualties were reported.

It was not immediately clear which country conducted the two attacks.

Mohammed Ali Gurey, the minister of fisheries and sea resources for Gal-mudug state, a self-styled administration in parts of Mudug region in central Somalia, on Friday told reporters in the northern town of Galka’yo that they received information that at least 15 Iranians were among those who came under attack.

“One of Iranians injured in the attack and brought to a local hospital along with two Somalis” the minister said.

“All Iranian citizens in the coastal town have [been] involved in illegal fishing off Somalia coasts,” Gurey spelled out.

Gal-mudug’s minister of fisheries also accused NATO warships and naval forces of harming and killing Somali fishermen intentionally, calling for the international community to intervene.

The Iranian government has not released any comments about the attacks or their wounded fishermen.

MUKTAR HAJI
mrmuhagi@gmail.com

GALMUDUG OIL AND GAS

GALMUDUG OIL AND GAS
East Africa is next hot oil zone

London APR 25 2011(UPI) --
East Africa is emerging as the next oil boom following a big strike in Uganda's Lake Albert Basin. Other oil and natural gas reserves have been found in Tanzania and Mozambique and exploration is under way in Ethiopia and even war-torn Somalia.

The region, until recently largely ignored by the energy industry, is "the last real high-potential area in the world that hasn't been fully explored," says Richard Schmitt, chief executive officer of Dubai's Black Marlin Energy, which is prospecting in East Africa.

The discovery at Lake Albert, in the center of Africa between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, is estimated to contain the equivalent of several billion barrels of oil. It is likely to be the biggest onshore field found south of the Sahara Desert in two decades.

Tullow Oil, the British exploration company backed by a $1.4 billion loan from the Royal Bank of Scotland, says its Ngassa field in Uganda may be the biggest find in the Lake Albert Basin to date with up to 600 million barrels.

Tullow has discovered reserves equivalent to around 2 billion barrels of oil in Uganda in the last four years. Most of the initial finds in East Africa were made by independent wildcatters like Tullow and another British firm, Heritage Oil, run by former mercenary Tony Buckingham.

Now the majors are moving in. Heritage recently sold its 50 percent share in two Lake Albert Basin fields to Eni of Italy for $1.5 billion.

Eni said the two blocks have the potential to produce 1 billion barrels and is fighting it out with Tullow for control of the reserves on the Ugandan side of Lake Albert.

The Italian company is busy expanding in sub-Saharan Africa and has interests in Angola, Nigeria, Gabon, Mozambique and the Republic of Congo.

The Ugandan government is negotiating with several majors with the financial clout to handle the enormous investment required to develop these emerging fields.

Front-runners reportedly include China's state-run CNOOC, Total of France and Exxon Mobil of the United States.

Andarko Petroleum Corp. of Texas says it has hit a giant natural gas field off the coast of Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony that became independent in 1975. Norway's Statoil is drilling in Mozambique's Rovuma Basin.

Since the 2006 find at Lake Albert, one of the Great Lakes of Africa strung out along the Great Rift Valley, there have been at least 15 confirmed major strikes in the region.

The Indian Ocean island of Madagascar contains "enormous reserves," according to Tiziana Luzzi-Arbouille of IHS Global Insight consultancy of London.

"What happened in Uganda made it easier for smaller companies to raise funding," said Tewodros Ashenafi, head of Southwest Energy, an Ethiopian company exploring in the Ogaden Basin in the east of the country.

This is a vast 135,000-square-mile territory in landlocked Ethiopia that is believed to contain sizable reserves of oil. It is estimated to hold 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas as well.

Malaysia's Petronas, which recently acquired major blocks in Iraq, signed an exploration agreement with Addis Ababa in August 2007.

The main problem for the oil industry is that the Ogaden, like many parts of Africa, is a conflict zone, as it has been pretty much since the Cold War in the 1970s. This is one reason why exploration has been so tardy.

Separatist rebels of the Ogaden National Liberation Front have warned oil companies to keep away and in April 2007 attacked a Chinese exploration group, killing 74 people.

Petronas is also exploring in the Gambella Basin of western Ethiopia.

Somalia has been torn by wars between feuding militias and clans since dictator Siad Barre was toppled in 1991 but it is also considered to hold considerable oil reserves.

A 1993 study by Petroconsultants of Geneva concluded that Somalia has two of the most potentially interesting hydrocarbon-yielding basins in the entire region -- one in the central Mudugh region, the other in the Gulf of Aden.

That was one of 10 such basins across Somalia, southeast Ethiopia and northeast Kenya.

More recent analyses indicate that Somalia could have reserves of up to 10 billion barrels.

But exploration remains an extremely hazardous undertaking. And it's likely to become more so as the country becomes a major focus for U.S. counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaida and its affiliates who are dug in there."

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/Resourc ... 268249530/

The two most promising hydrocarbon-yielding basins is located in North Central Somalia now called GalMudug State
Muktar Haji Blogger Galmudug4life.
MUKTAR@LIVE.CO.UK

Galmudug State Of Somalia Oil and Gas

GALMUDUG OIL AND GAS FACTOR IN SOMALIA
FOUR AMERICAN PETROLEUM GIANTS HAD AGREEMENTS WITH THE AFRICAN NATION BEFORE ITS CIVIL WAR BEGAN. THEY COULD REAP BIG REWARDS IF PEACE IS RESTORED
By MARK FINEMAN
DATELINE: MOGADISHU, Somalia
Far beneath the surface of the tragic drama of Somalia, four major U.S. oil companies are quietly sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore and exploit tens of millions of acres of the Somali countryside.
That land, in the opinion of geologists and industry sources, could yield significant amounts of oil and natural gas if the U.S.-led military mission can restore peace to the impoverished East African nation.
According to documents obtained by The Times, nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration's decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there.
Officially, the Administration and the State Department insist that the U.S. military mission in Somalia is strictly humanitarian. Oil industry spokesmen dismissed as "absurd" and "nonsense" allegations by aid experts, veteran East Africa analysts and several prominent Somalis that President Bush, a former Texas oilman, was moved to act in Somalia, at least in part, by the U.S. corporate oil stake.
But corporate and scientific documents disclosed that the American companies are well positioned to pursue Somalia's most promising potential oil reserves the moment the nation is pacified. And the State Department and U.S. military officials acknowledge that one of those oil companies has done more than simply sit back and hope for pece.
Conoco Inc., the only major multinational corporation to mantain a functioning office in Mogadishu throughout the past two years of nationwide anarchy, has been directly involved in the U.S. government's role in the U.N.-sponsored humanitarian military effort.
Conoco, whose tireless exploration efforts in north-central Somalia called Galmudug state of Somalia reportedly had yielded the most encouraging prospects just before Siad Barre's fall, permitted its Mogadishu corporate compound to be transformed into a de facto American embassy a few days before the U.S. Marines landed in the capital, with Bush's special envoy using it as his temporary headquarters. In addition, the president of the company's subsidiary in Somalia won high official praise for serving as the government's volunteer "facilitator" during the months before and during the U.S. intervention.
Describing the arrangement as "a business relationship," an official spokesman for the Houston-based parent corporation of Conoco Somalia Ltd. said the U.S. government was paying rental for its use of the compound, and he insisted that Conoco was proud of resident general manager Raymond Marchand's contribution to the U.S.-led humanitarian effort.
John Geybauer, spokesman for Conoco Oil in Houston, said the company was acting as "a good corporate citizen and neighbor" in granting the U.S. government's request to be allowed to rent the compound. The U.S. Embassy and most other buildings and residential compounds here in the capital were rendered unusable by vandalism and fierce artillery duels during the clan wars that have consumed Somalia and starved its people.
In its in-house magazine last month, Conoco reprinted excerpts from a letter of commendation for Marchand written by U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Frank Libutti, who has been acting as military aide to U.S. envoy Robert B. Oakley. In the letter, Libutti praised the oil official for his role in the initial operation to land Marines on Mogadishu's beaches in December, and the general concluded, "Without Raymond's courageous contributions and selfless service, the operation would have failed."
But the close relationship between Conoco and the U.S. intervention force has left many Somalis and foreign development experts deeply troubled by the blurry line between the U.S. government and the large oil company, leading many to liken the Somalia operation to a miniature version of Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led military effort in January, 1991, to drive Iraq from Kuwait and, more broadly, safeguard the world's largest oil reserves.