The exact number of men, identified as workers of the China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), abducted or missing was still unclear.

Bayelsa State government spokesman Ekiyor Welson told AFP: "Two people were taken. Both were employees of CNPC."

But national police spokesman Haz Iwendi said: "Nine people are missing." He added that he did not know whether all nine had been abducted or whether some were perhaps in hiding.

Meanwhile an oil industry official in Port Harcourt, Nigeria's oil capital in neighbouring Rivers State, said: "It's sure that three men were taken and a fourth one is missing.

The Bayelsa spokesman said the state government was "trying to make contact" with the men, taken by their captors to an unknown location.

Gunmen also raided the CNPC office and staff living quarters and took an unspecified amount of cash, the police and industry officials said.

"The motive for this attack was money", an industry official in Warri, an oil city in neighbouring Delta State, told AFP.

Chinese embassy officials were not available for comment.

No party has so far claimed responsibility for the attack. The most prominent separatist group in the region, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), told AFP it was not involved in the abduction.

"It was likely carried out for money", the group's spokesman said in an email.

This is the second time so far this month that Chinese working in Africa's biggest oil-producing country have been seized.

On January 5, gunmen abducted five Chinese telecoms workers from their residence and ferried them to an unknown location. The workers were employees of Sichuan Telecommunications Company. They were working on a project to extend telephone services to rural areas when they were seized.

They were released by their unidentified kidnappers on January 17 and have since returned home.

Since the beginning of 2006, dozens of foreign workers, mainly in the oil industry, have been kidnapped in the Niger Delta region.

The kidnappers are a mixture of criminal gangs lured by the idea of easy money and separatist groups with political agendas, security experts say.

Residents of the Niger Delta, where the Ijaw people are the largest single ethnic group, complain that while the region generates 95 percent of Nigeria's foreign currency earnings, they have little to show for this in terms of development or living standards.

On Tuesday, a US citizen and a Briton were abducted and a ransom demand of about 13.8 million dollars is said to have been made.

Twenty four Filipinos, two Italians and one Lebanese national are also currently being held hostage in the delta.

Security advisors in the region see no political agenda against Asian workers on the part of their abductors. Rather, they said, it is a question of how easy it is to seize workers of different nationalities.

One pointed out that the draconian security measures put in place by western oil companies make seizing westerners difficult, "whereas for the Chinese and the Koreans, life is cheap".

Conversely, among the gangs "there is obviously more kudos in seizing an American", the advisor added.

Another security expert said it was to be expected that Chinese should be targeted as Chinese companies are being awarded more and more contracts and Chinese workers are therefore coming into Nigeria in ever-greater numbers.

The 24 Filipinos, who were abducted on January 20 in nearby Delta State, have yet to be released although negotiations are underway between state government officials and the community holding the men.

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