CAN oil co. offers $500K reward for bombers' capture (Nat'l Post)‏
National Post (Toronto, CAN)
Spooked oilpatch posts $500K reward
Pipeline bomber, arson at oilman's home fuel fear
Kevin Libin,
Published: Wednesday, January 14, 2009
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1173916The key element differentiating the firebombing of an Edmonton oil
executive's home on the weekend from a pattern of similar ecoterrorist
attacks in the United States is that no one has taken credit for it.
So far.
Already police in Alberta have their hands full dealing with an
unsolved series of environmentally inspired attacks elsewhere in the
oilpatch.
Yesterday, Calgary's EnCana Corp., Canada's largest energy interest,
offered a $500,000 reward for information leading to the capture of
bombers who have been blowing up gas facilities in northeastern B. C.
Their most recent target, on Jan. 4, was an exploded shed, housing a
sour gas pipe.
"Whoever is responsible for these bombings has got to be stopped
before someone gets hurt," asid Mike Graham, En-Cana's executive
vice-president.
Investigators from Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver have hit a dead end
in tracking down the culprit behind four EnCana bombings since they
began in October.
They have questioned locals known for their antipathy to the industry
and other possible suspects. Certain people, authorities say, are
proving unco-operative. They appear to believe a reward might shake
something loose.
"They tried the stick," said Paul Joosse, a University of Alberta
sociologist researching eco-terror movements. "Now they're going to
try the carrot."
The next few days should determine whether the recently retired
president of Syncrude Canada, Jim Carter -- whose home was destroyed
by Molotov cocktails on Saturday -- is also treated as the work of
radical elements, or just a coincidence of arson.
Groups such as the Earth Liberation Front, which has claimed
responsibility for torching car dealerships, ski resorts and housing
developments in the United States, typically take credit for an attack
like this, Mr. Joosse says, though it may take a while.
"Vandals rarely claim responsibility for their actions, but terrorists
compulsively do," says Andrew Nikiforuk, author of Saboteurs: Wiebo
Ludwig's War Against Big Oil, which profiled the anti-oil activist and
his involvement in similar bombings of energy infrastructure in the
1990s. "It could even be the work of individuals trying to discredit
environmentalists."
But the fact that neighbours report seeing a group of people running
from the burning home, the planning involved in making bombs for the
attack, and the fact that Mr. Carter's Cadillac SUV-- licence plate
DRT 2 OIL -- had been previously vandalized, certainly don't rule out
the possibility that some organized group may be involved, Mr. Joosse
says.
There is no suggestion that the Encana bombings and the attacks on Mr.
Carter's home -- if the oil executive was, indeed, deliberately
targeted -- are linked. Police suspect the explosions, at Tomslake, B.
C., are the work of local landowners, angry about sour gas wells
nearby, which some claim poison their livestock and devalue their
property. Also, the bombers sent an anonymous warning to the local
paper ahead of time: "We will no longer negotiate with terrorists
which you are as you keep endangering our families with crazy
expansion of deadly gas wells in our home lands," it read.
But taken together, two cases arriving so close together have sent a
current of anxiety through Western boardrooms over a threat they have
rarely seen before.
Eco-vandals have been around for decades. But in the United States and
Europe, certain left wing, environmentalist and animal-rights groups
have in recent years ramped up the ferocity of their assaults on
corporate interests, says John Thompson, director of the Mackenzie
Institute, a Toronto-based security think-tank. "There's been more and
more of a hard edge to them," he says. "The current generation [of
activists] is really nasty. They'll pick on particular individuals;
target them."
The FBI recently fingered eco-terror groups as America's number one
domestic terror threat.
Given the loose affiliation of these sorts of activists, these are
often extremely difficult cases to solve, Mr. Joosse notes. To date,
Canada has been mostly spared such violence, though a number of
construction sites near Guelph were vandalized in 2006, with ELF's
Canadian chapter taking credit.
At the very least, the attacks on Encana and the former Syncrude
executive have awakened industry to the threat of environmental
extremists taking matters into their own, aggressive hands. Growing
international scrutiny and campaigns against Canadian oil for its
elevated carbon emissions -- as well as the death of 500 ducks in
April, who became stuck in an oilsands tailings pond -- remind
everyone here of the possibility that anti-energy protests have the
potential to turn vicious, if not deadly.