Firefighters battled Saturday to control the fire, which is the deadliest incident in the company’s history, he said.
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The company said Friday that all workers had been moved away from the area on fire, with all or a lot of them taking shelter in life boats attached to the platform.
The missing workers were in a lifeboat that fell into stormy seas, according to a joint statement issued late Saturday by SOCAR, the country’s emergency services and the prosecutor general’s office. The workers in the other lifeboat were rescued on Saturday, it said.
President Ilham Aliyev established a state commission headed by First Deputy Prime Minister Yaqub Eyyubov to investigate the incident, state news agency Azartac reported.
There are fears more than 30 workers have been killed after an offshore oil platform burst into flames in Azerbaijan.
The fire started after the storm damaged a natural gas pipeline, causing the platform’s partial collapse.
Mirvari Gakhramanly, of Azerbaijan’s Oil Workers’ Rights Protection Committee, told the BBC that the workers were missing, presumed dead.
As hopes of finding survivors faded, SOCAR said a severe storm was hampering rescue efforts at its platform in the Guneshli oil field.
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In 1994, the government of Azerbaijan signed an agreement to develop the vast Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli field with a consortium of foreign companies, including Britain’s BP, Norway’s Statoil, and American oil and gas giants Chevron and Exxonmobil.
