Tiger air attack costs Shell 700,000 dollars

[TamilNet, Sunday, 13 May 2007, 03:22 GMT]
The Sri Lankan unit of Royal Dutch Shell suffered damages of at least 700,000 dollars in an air attack by a Tamil Tiger aircraft last month, AFP quoted the company as saying Saturday. A second aircraft bombed an oil storage site scored a direct hit and destroying a storage tank holding heavy oil, officials told AFP.

Two LTTE light aircraft bombed the two sites near the capitol, Colombo, on April 28.

Two bombs exploded at the Anglo-Dutch company's storage facility on the outskirts of Colombo, damaging one of its four storage terminals and disabling its fire-fighting operations, the company said.

"There was big damage to our fire-fighting facility and we estimate it will cost us in excess of 75 million rupees (700,000 dollars) to put things back," AFP quoted Shell's Sri Lankan country director, Hassan Madani, as saying.

The damage caused by the attack, along with heavy monsoon rains, disrupted distribution of supplies for ten days, with some households running out of cooking gas in Colombo and its suburbs.

"Supplies are now being gradually restored," Madani said.

In the same attack, another LTTE aircraft dropped bombs at a nearby oil storage depot which is jointly owned by the Indian Oil Corp and Sri Lanka's state-owned Ceylon Petroleum Corp.

Though neither of the two companies that own the oil storage depot have announced the cost of the damage, officials at the site said that one of the bombs scored a direct hit and destroyed a storage tank holding heavy oil.

Shell acquired a 51 percent stake in the Colombo Gas Company when it was privatised in 1995.