SAO TOME, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Members of Sao Tome and Principe's elite police force known as the "Ninjas" have seized police headquarters in the tiny African island state and taken several officers hostage, witnesses said on Tuesday. Around 100 armed members of the Angolan-trained commandos occupied the main police station in the sleepy colonial capital Sao Tome on Monday, demanding the payment of a bonus and the construction of their own headquarters. The Ninjas, who staged a similar protest a year ago in the impoverished former Portuguese colony of some 170,000 people, released the national chief of police on Tuesday to act as an intermediary with President Fradique de Menezes' government. "We have freed the commander who, together with two of our representatives, has already started negotiations," Wilson Quaresma, spokesman for the Ninjas, told Reuters. "We expect the talks to produce a result today." Set in the heart of the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, the tiny archipelago hopes to follow neighbouring Equatorial Guinea to become the latest member of sub-Saharan Africa's exclusive oil exporters' club. U.S. oil major Chevron Corp <CVX.N> raised industry hopes in May when it announced an oil and gas discovery in the joint-development zone between Sao Tome and Nigeria. Test results this year should indicate whether the discovery is commercially viable. In the meantime, the world's smallest Portuguese-speaking country continues to grapple with biting poverty. It won $327 million in multilateral debt relief in February from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) scheme, but faces enormous challenges to provide basic health care and education. With the United States looking to improve security in the Gulf of Guinea, which supplies nearly a fifth of its oil imports, the U.S. navy selected Sao Tome as the site for an $18 million radar listening post to monitor shipping in the region. (Additional reporting by Estelle Shirbon in Abuja)
