Armed men kidnapped three foreigners in oil-rich southern Nigeria on Sunday, local television reported, three days after a three year-old British girl was taken hostage in the same region.
Channels Television said the men, believed to be either Lebanese or Chinese were seized from a compound in Port Harcourt and taken to an unknown location.
The television quoted Rivers State police commissioner Felix Ogbaudu as confirming the kidnapping, but declining to give details.
There was no immediate confirmation of the report from government and security officials and no group has claimed responsibility for the abduction.
The kidnapping came three days after a three-year-old British toddler Margaret Hill was snatched in the city on the way to school on Thursday.
Her mother, Nigerian-born Oluchi Hill, told AFP that she has spoken to kidnappers on Sunday and had heard her daughter crying in the background. The kidnappers are demanding a ransom for her safe return.
More than 200 foreigners have been taken hostage since January 2006, but most of them have been released unharmed.
Kidnapped Toddler Still Being Held (AFP)
Nigerian kidnappers are still keeping three-year-old British girl Margaret Hill who was snatched in the oil city of Port Harcourt three days ago, her mother said Sunday.
"My baby is still with them. Her captors just called me on the phone and I could hear the cry of Margaret at the background," Nigerian-born Oluchi Hill told AFP, sobbing.
"My little girl is crying pleading with them that I should be allowed to come and take her home," she said. "But the kidnappers quickly put off the phone".
Oluchi said on Saturday that the captors had demanded a ransom, a day after threatening to kill the little girl if her father, Michael Hill, did not take her place.
"They have asked for money. Who will help me to pay them?" she said.
Nigerian security agents have stepped up efforts to secure the release of the toddler who was snatched at gunpoint on Thursday in Port Harcourt in the southern Rivers state as she was being dropped off for school.
State police commissioner Felix Ogbaudu said late Saturday that Margaret might be released within 24 hours.
"We have the rumour that she will be released between now and tomorrow," he told AFP, adding that the police "had information" on the whereabouts of the girl.
No group has claimed responsibility for the abduction, the latest to hit the restive Niger Delta, but the main separatist group in the region, MEND, has condemned the kidnapping.
Asari Says Kidnapping Product of Nigerian Government (Nigerian Tribune)
Alhaji Mujahedeen Asari-Dokubo has appealed to kidnappers in the Niger-Delta region to search their conscience since there is always a day of reckoning in this world or in the hereafter, even as he alleged that Federal Government was paying militia groups in the Niger Delta to carry out the kidnappings.
"The kidnappings were the creation of the government. Officials of government know the people perpetrating the kidnappings and other crimes in the Niger Delta,"the leader of the Niger-Delta Peoples Volunteer Force (NDPVF) has said. Alhaji Dokubo was asked on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Focus on Africa Programme, monitored in Kaduna at the weekend, to react to a statement credited to some of the militia groups that "the kidnappings in the Niger Delta were carried out to ensure his release from detention."
His words:"I don't think so. The kidnappers are a creation of the government. The government knows the people who are committing these crimes and they are being paid by the government to commit these crimes," he pointed out.
The major militia groups in the Niger Delta, he added, have decided to fight against kidnappings and that they will turn against any group involved in the act.
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