TEHRAN/LAGOS, 20 March 2003 — Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell shut down production in one of its oilfields in the northern Gulf and pulled 260 Iranian and expatriate staff out of the area because of the looming war on Iraq, a spokesman told AFP.

The Anglo-Dutch group said it had stopped production in the Sorush oilfield, which had been producing 60,000 barrels a day, and evacuated staff from both Sorush and Nowruz, which was due to start producing in the second half of 2003.

“Iranian staff were brought ashore in Iran while our foreign employees were sent to Dubai,” said spokesman Ali Kalali, without indicating how many of the personnel were expatriates.

He said the company’s operations in the two offshore fields would resume as soon as security conditions permitted. All the company’s facilities in the oilfields were made safe before the evacuation, he added.

French oil company Total for its part said it was following the situation closely but had not evacuated any of its employees in the area. The oilfields where Elf operates in the Gulf are much further south than those of Royal Dutch Shell.

Meanwhile, Shell Nigeria said yesterday militants shot at a helicopter evacuating workers from its Escravos terminal amid oilfield unrest.

Shell reported a loss of 76,000 barrels of oil in daily output following four days of violent fighting in southern Nigeria’s Niger Delta region.

“The company has recorded additional loss of 46,000 barrels per day of crude oil because we had to close more flow stations in the crisis area,” a company spokesman told AFP.

On Sunday, Shell shut down two flow stations — Jones Creek and Egwa 1 — after militant youths from the Ijaw ethnic group clashed with Nigerian naval patrols in the swamps south of Warri.

The two pumping stations accounted for some 30,000 bpd of oil, a Shell spokesman said, citing security concerns as the reason for closures. Shell accounts for one-third of the west African country’s daily output of 2.018 million barrels.

Shell and the US oil major ChevronTexaco operate in the Warri area, a troubled region of coastal swamps 320 km east of Lagos.

ChevronTexaco said in a statement yesterday two contract workers were hit by stray bullets during the fighting.

It said one of them died on Tuesday while the other is in critical condition in hospital.

The company did not say if the crisis has affected its operations. The Warri crisis is the latest in a series of violent incidents in Africa’s most populous country less than six weeks before the start of Nigeria’s first national polls since the country returned to civilian rule in May 1999.

Tensions are already high, with dozens killed in riots and assassinations in recent weeks.