2010-04-09
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Gunmen in Ethiopia have killed a British geologist working for state-run Malaysian energy firm Petronas and two soldiers protecting him, an Ethiopian government spokesman said on Friday.

The Briton died in the shooting on Monday near Danot town in the Warder zone of eastern Ethiopia, the British Embassy in Addis Ababa said.

"Bandits ambushed a vehicle and shot and killed Englishman ... Jason Reid, and two army servicemen," government spokesman Shimeles Kemal told Reuters. "They were not rebels. They were mere bandits."

However, rebel groups have fought since the 1960s for independence for the region, which is populated by ethnic Somalis and borders Somalia. Foreign firms have been eyeing potential oil and gas deposits in the Somali region, despite threats from the separatist rebels.

British embassy spokesman Gavin Cook said that Reid, aged 39, was from the southern English town of Portsmouth. He was an employee of British firm IMC Geophysics International.

Ethiopia has not yet discovered oil or gas but companies including Petronas and Vancouver-based Africa Oil Corp are prospecting in its deserts, pointing to oil fields in neighbouring countries.

The Ethiopian government also said on Friday that an Islamist rebel group, the United Western Somali Liberation Front the Somali region had surrendered. It had warned oil and gas firms not to explore in the area.

"THEFT UNLIKELY"

Another rebel group, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), which routinely warns foreign oil and gas firms away from Ethiopia, denied responsibility for the Briton's death.

"We are not involved in that assassination and we are sorry about the incident," a British-based spokesman, Abdurahmin Mohammed Mahdi, told Reuters. "We have ordered our military not to attack expatriate oil workers for now."

Several aid workers in the region, who did not want to be named, told Reuters they doubted theft had been the motive for the attack. "They didn't seek to steal anything," one senior foreign aid official said. "They simply opened fire with AK-47s and riddled the car."

In 2007 the ONLF attacked an oilfield run by Sinopec, Asia's biggest refiner and China's second largest oil and gas producer. Sinopec pulled out of the region where most of Ethiopia's oil and gas exploration activities have centred.

Ethiopia calls the ONLF a terrorist group, which it says is supported by rival Eritrea. The ONLF routinely accuses government forces of rights abuses.