Saboteurs hit Iranian oil pipelines

IranMania
Sep. 03, 2005

Saboteurs using three home-made bombs have halted crude transfers from five onshore wells in Iran's restive southwestern province of Khuzestan, the student agency ISNA reported Saturday.

"The evidence indicates that the incidents on Thursday were sabotage," a security official from the provincial governor-general's office, Gholamreza Shariati, was quoted as saying.

After undergoing two days of repair, the pipelines were reported to be back in service, ISNA said.

Shariati said that "some suspicious individuals" have been arrested in connection with the blasts, which had sparked the automatic shutdown of five wells.

According to the report, three pipelines operated by Karun Oil and Gas Producing Company (KOGPC) -- a secondary subsidiary of the state-run National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) -- were damaged.

The Khuzestan-based KOGPC handles 1.04 million barrels per day of Iran's total production -- currently 4.2 million bpd. The report did not specify the impact of the bombings on this production figure.

Iran is OPEC's second crude exporter.

"The damaged pipelines and one oil field have been repaired and are back in service," KOGPC's deputy managing director Ahmad Tahan-Pesar said. "We have no decline in production at the moment."

Khuzestan is the centre of Iran's oil production, but has also been the scene of recent ethnic troubles that authorities have blamed on Arab separatists, US-based Iranian exile groups and loyalists of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

In April, a forged official letter saying Tehran wanted to change the province's ethnic makeup sparked several days of rioting between the local Arab population and security forces in Ahvaz.

Five people were reportedly killed and hundreds arrested in April's riots, while a string of bombings in the run-up to June's presidential elections killed at least six.

Arabs are said to represent three percent of Iran's population of 66.5 million, who are mainly Farsi speaking, but form the majority in Khuzestan.

On June 16, the then Iranian intelligence minister Ali Yunessi said both the United States and Britain were seeking to instigate ethnic and religious tensions in the Middle East and in Iran.