The Zhongyuan Petroleum Exploration Bureau (ZPEB) has cautioned all its employees working abroad to "be on alert" against attacks similar to the one in Ethiopia on Tuesday in which nine Chinese were killed.

The company has more than 90 working teams in 10 foreign countries and all of them have been warned against the possible danger, said a media department source of ZPEB, which is a subsidiary of China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec).

Sinopec, too, has said that it has set up an emergency-responding system to cope with the tragedy.

All the Chinese victims were from Central China's Henan Province, where ZPEB has its headquarters, the Legal Evening News said yesterday. Since the project is new, the workers had been in Ethiopia for just the past two or three months.

"We will definitely continue the construction work on the site, but the work has been interrupted," the ZPEB source told Shanghai Evening News.

"It happened too soon and unexpectedly," he said. Since the bodies of the victims are yet to be identified "we can now only inform their relatives back home and ask them to be mentally prepared for the worst".

The Ethiopian authorities have beefed up security arrangements in and around the construction site after the attack.

Yang Rehua, a Chinese working on a construction site about 100 km from the ZPEB project, told www.china.com.cn that 30 additional policemen had been deployed at the site of the carnage.

The 32 Chinese workers on Yang's site were seeking suspension of work, he said, because "everyone is nervous after the attack".

Source: China Daily