Nine foreign oil workers were reportedly kidnapped by ISIS militants during a field raid in Libya Friday in which eight guards are said to have been beheaded.
Austrian officials told the BBC that ISIS attacked the al-Ghani oil field, located southeast of Tripoli, on Friday. The Libyan army confirmed the attack, and said one oil worker died of a heart attack during the beheadings.
The kidnapped oil workers — four Filipinos, one Austrian, one Bangladeshi, a Czech, a Ghanaian, and one unidentified person — worked for Value Added Oilfield Services, according to the BBC.
But that company insists none of its workers “died or were physically harmed in the attack,” the British news organization reported.
This is just the latest in a string of attacks that have
shut down 11 oil fields, The Guardian reported.
Libyan military spokesperson Ahmed al-Mesmari said that the ISIS goal is to take control of the country’s petroleum industry.
“This is the lifeline of the Libyan people,” he told The Guardian, and said consequences would be extreme.
However, the BBC quoted al-Mesmari as saying the goal was just to damage the industry.
“The attackers don't want to control the oil fields, that's not their aim — it seems their aim is to burn, destroy, and steal whatever they can," the BBC quoted him.
The Guardian confirmed with the Filipino government that four of their nationals were kidnapped in the attack, bringing the number of Filipino citizens missing in the country to seven.
Charles Jose, a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs in the Philippines, told The Guardian that the country has asked the 4,000 Filipinos working in Libya to contact the Philippine embassy about mandatory repatriation, which would pay the costs associated with returning to the Philippines.
Reuters reported Saturday that the oil field is back under Libyan control, and that no group has made any demands regarding the kidnapping.
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