Seven Venezuela oil workers arrested over refinery outage, sources say

PUNTO FIJO, Venezuela (Reuters) - Seven Venezuelan oil workers have been detained by military counterintelligence officers following an outage at a unit of state oil company PDVSA's 310,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) Cardon refinery, according to eight sources familiar with the matter.

The arrests took place last week after workers attempted to restart the 45,000-bpd reformer unit, which produces octane blending components used to create motor fuels. The failed restart damaged one of the plant’s compressors, the sources said, adding that the detainees could face terrorism charges.