An environmental advocacy group says at least 37 people died after breathing toxic petroleum fumes during an alleged oil theft at Okari Jetty, in the Okrika Local Government Area of Nigeria’s Rivers State, at about midnight on Thursday, September 3, 2026. A week later, no government agency has confirmed that figure. The Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps has verified four deaths and said earlier tallies may have been overstated.
The dead are suspected to have been involved in illegal oil bunkering, according to the Youths and Environmental Advocacy Centre (YEAC-Nigeria). Volunteers and human rights defenders working with the group across the Niger Delta had documented no fewer than 37 deaths, said Dr. Fyneface Dumnamene Fyneface, its executive director; the victims, he said, breathed in a product known locally as “Indorama fuel.”
What that product actually is has not been established. YEAC-Nigeria describes it as refined petrol moving through a pipeline that runs from the Indorama Eleme Petrochemical Company past the Port Harcourt Refinery to ships that berth roughly every two weeks to load cargo for export. The Indorama Eleme plant’s main lines are polymers and fertiliser rather than motor fuel, and the civil defence corps has said the substance involved is not yet conclusively identified. Fyneface said the victims had run a pipe from a tapping point on the line and inhaled the product at high pressure as it was pumped, loading it into their boats at the same time.
What Happened at Okari Jetty
The crowd arrived in locally made boats while a ship sat at the jetty taking on petroleum products bound for export. Community sources put the number at more than 200 young men from Okrika and neighboring communities; another account described more than 100 people gathered at the site.
As the vessel loaded and the young men scooped from the illegal tap, the smell of the fuel turned sharp and overpowering. Many of them breathed the fumes at high pressure and dropped where they stood, witnesses said, and the river took some of the bodies. Medical teams were attending to others who got away and were taken to hospitals with severe respiratory complications.
That is one account of the night. A separate report published on September 8 held that the victims had been fishing when an explosion occurred, and residents of nearby Ibuluya have told reporters that nothing happened at all. Two of them, John Iyo and a woman identified as Madam Felicia Jacob, said no such deaths took place in their community. Major Fidelis Akandu, a retired officer who runs pipeline surveillance for the Ijaw ethnic nationality’s contractor arrangement with the pipeline operator, put the challenge more sharply. “If even it was one person that died, please, where is the corpse?” he said.
Three Counts, No Agreement
The dead had gone out to collect petroleum products drifting on the water, according to Igwe Godswill, who commands the Civilian Joint Task Force in the Okrika Local Government Area. Fumes coming off the vessel being loaded overwhelmed them, he said.
“These are not criminals or anything, but they went out in search of their daily meal,” Godswill said.
By the time he spoke, he said, about 10 bodies had been recovered — four of them identified, four unrecognizable and the rest impossible to identify because the remains were badly damaged. Three separate counts are now in circulation and none of them agrees: 37 from YEAC-Nigeria, 43 from a community tally that adds six unidentified bodies to 37 Okrika indigenes, and about 10 from the task force commander who says he saw them.
Some of the dead had been spotted in the water but had not been retrieved, Fyneface said, and community sources reported that corpses were still surfacing in the river. Many people remain unaccounted for, and authorities say the search for the missing is continuing.
Police Confirm Deaths, Open Inquiry
An investigation was underway, Nigerian police said on Friday, September 4, in a confirmation of the incident that gave no death toll. Assistant Superintendent Agabe Blessing Kaborlo, who has been the Rivers State Police Command’s spokeswoman since April, confirmed that people had died while allegedly attempting to steal crude oil, and said an “investigation is ongoing to establish the circumstances surrounding the incident and ascertain the facts.”
No official complaint had been lodged with the command, she said, adding that officers had begun work to establish how many people died and the circumstances of the deaths.
The Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps said it is working with other security agencies to establish what happened in the early hours of September 3, and urged the public and the media to rely on verified information. The corps condemned illegal tapping and siphoning, warning that such activities put lives, the environment and the economy at risk.
A Denial That Does Not Match the Record
A group calling itself LightHope Succor Worldwide Initiative challenged the account on September 4, saying in a statement signed by its spokesperson, Evelyn Williams, that the Nigeria Police Force, the Nigerian Navy and the Nigerian Army had all denied that 37 people died from toxic fumes at Okari Jetty. Security authorities, the statement said, “confirmed that no such incident occurred at the jetty on the date in question.”
None of the three services has said any such thing publicly. The police went the other way, confirming deaths and opening an investigation the same day the statement was issued. The claim rests entirely on the group’s own characterization of what it was told.
Little about the group itself can be established. It has no traceable founder, registration, website or prior public statement, and the Nigerian business daily BusinessDay identified it in its coverage as an oil and gas services firm rather than a civil society organization.
In the same statement, the group urged the originators of the 37-death report to provide verifiable evidence, and it called on media organizations to carry out editorial checks before reproducing claims of mass casualties.
The civil defence corps said on September 6 that its operatives had sighted four corpses in creeks near the jetty during follow-up surveillance, the only deaths any agency has so far verified. Olufemi Ayodele, the corps spokesperson in Rivers State, named them as Taribo Levia, Ogoloma Tamunoene Fred, Amiso and Belema Siyerminma, and said the discovery had prompted further work to confirm their identities and how they died. Indorama-Eleme Petrochemicals Company Limited has opened its own investigation into the deaths.
Calls for Jobs and Pipeline Security
YEAC-Nigeria called on the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency to carry out a Joint Investigation Visit at the site without delay. The operator whose pipeline was reportedly vandalized also came under pressure from the group to tighten security around its facilities and prevent a repeat, while Fyneface told young people to keep away from oil and gas infrastructure because of the dangers involved.
Alternative livelihoods in the region were another of the group’s demands. Modular refineries figured on that list, along with the legalization of artisanal refining and two proposals Fyneface has been pressing on the federal government since 2020: a Presidential Artisanal Crude Oil Refining Development Initiative and a Niger Delta Industrial Park. Neither has been adopted.
Godswill made a similar appeal. Employment for young people in the area was what he urged the Rivers State Government, community leaders and other authorities to create. Force alone would not stop the practice, he said, because residents would keep returning to the tapping point as long as it remained their only source of income. People went back to the site even after the deaths there had been confirmed, he said.
Oil theft has been widespread across the Niger Delta for years. Nigeria ranks as Africa’s biggest oil producer, and decades of exploration in the delta have left behind deep poverty along with badly degraded land and water. The Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission puts the cumulative loss at about 353 million barrels, worth roughly $25.7 billion, between 2002 and 2025, and reported theft down to about 11,100 barrels a day as of May 2025. The Nigerian military and navy have stepped up operations against the trade in recent years.
