Four Italians have been kidnapped near the oil and gas port of Mellitah in Libya, the Italian foreign ministry has announced.

The group was seized on Sunday by unknown assailants near a compound controlled by Italian oil group Eni, which co-owns a pipeline with Libya’s state-run National Oil Company that exports natural gas to Italy. The Italians are understood to have been travelling to the area from the Tunisian border.

“We are busy trying to find the people that were kidnapped and trying to solve this problem,” Paolo Gentiloni, the foreign minister, said. “It’s very difficult after just a few hours to understand the nature of this kidnapping, who is responsible for it.”

Mellitah is not far from Sabratha, which Tunisia says hosts an Islamic State base which trained Seifeddine Rezgui, the Sousse attacker who killed 38 tourists last month, and two gunmen who killed 22 tourists in March at the Tunis Bardo museum.

It is also close to the beach where British oil worker Mark De Salis and a woman from New Zealand were found shot dead in January last year.

The four Italian men were employees of a Parma-based general contractor called Bonatti. According to its website, the group provides engineering, procurement and construction services to oil and gas companies. Its list of new and ongoing projects includes a project in Mellitah whose client is listed as GreenStream, the name of the 520km-long pipeline running from Libya to Italy which is seen as a critical energy source.



Eni is the only big oil company that has maintained a presence in the war-torn area, even as security risks have driven rivals to suspend production. A report in the Wall Street Journal in April that examined how Eni was able to work in Libya said that Bonatti helped to provide security arrangements for its joint venture.