Nigeria was urged to re-open investigations into 89 oil spills in its southern delta region after claims that Shell and ENI misreported the causes.

Rights group Amnesty International said there were "reasonable doubts" about how the spills happened, suggesting corrosion rather than oil theft were behind the pollution. A

total of 46 spills came from pipelines operated by Shell's local subsidiary, the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria, and 43 from ENI's Nigerian Agip Oil Company, it added.

The call was made after crowd-sourced analysis of the companies' publicly available documents on pipeline failures in the Niger Delta in the last seven years to December 2017. Activists who pored over reports found that since Shell began publishing details in January 2011, it had 1,010 spills amounting to 110,535 barrels or 17.5 million liters of crude.

ENI had 820 spills – the equivalent of 26,286 barrels or 4.1 million liters of oil - since it made its reports public in 2014.