Ga. man says he ‘felt like I was in an action movie’ when kidnappers whisked him away

Washington Post (AP)

30 January 2012

Ga. man says he ‘felt like I was in an action movie’ when kidnappers whisked him away

BOWDON, Ga. — As the car an American man was riding in idled in traffic in a remote Nigerian town, two men appeared, one of them shooting the Georgia man’s security guard five times, while the other forced him into a tiny getaway car that sped away.

The car weaved through traffic on side roads and then sped to a main road, where police, known there as “mopols,” had erected a roadblock. Greg Ock’s captors crashed through the barricade and traded fire with a truck of police officers, who narrowly missed the 50-year-old Ock.

Greg Ock recounts how he was kidnapped and held hostage in Nigeria during an interview at his home in Bowdon, Ga., Monday, Jan. 30, 2012. Ock was on his way to a clinic about an hour’s drive from the Nigerian plant where he worked as a contractor when a gunman ran up to the car he was driving in, shot his security guard about five times and forced him into a tiny red Audi. Ock was released and returned home Sunday.

.“I felt like I was in an action movie,” Ock told The Associated Press at his west Georgia home on Monday, a day after he returned to his family. As they were speeding away from the police, he said he told his guards: “I was more afraid of mopols than you guys.”

Ock was kidnapped on Jan. 20 in Warri, a main city in the Niger Delta, an oil-rich area where foreign firms pump 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day. After being held seven days, he was released on Friday.