>How did they financially suppress fuel prices?
If you google for the "oil price today" you will find something like $75. However, if you look closely, it's the price of oil futures for September. Futures are not oil, they are contracts. If you need to buy oil in September and you expect the price to be higher than $75 you can buy such a contract and guarantee your price to be $75 now. However, you can also buy such a contract even if you don't need to buy oil ever, hoping its price will go up and you can sell it at profit (you can also do it on margin i.e. only put enough money to cover daily price change). And a whole lot of people do exactly this (likewise, they also can sell these contracts even though they don't have a drop of oil to sell).
Normally, the large volume of these speculative contracts cancel each other before the expiration date and no oil changes hands. However, because most of these traders don't have oil or the ability to take delivery on oil, a "squeeze" is possible. Say, you bought $75 oil futures for September today, hoping to sell them at premium sometime before today and the last trading day at the end of August. As that day approaches you see that the price is still $75 or even lower. Oil spot price (the actual price) can be anything (it was about $100 last week), maybe $100, maybe $200 but nobody is buying futures at this price, because someone is selling them at $68. If you had a refinery with storage to take few thousand barrels, you'd be happy as you got a great deal on oil. However, if you are just a dude at a computer in a NYC apartment, you are now in big trouble - you have to pay $75K for each contract you hold and take delivery on 1000 barrels of oil. Either or both might be impossible for you so, instead, you just sell yours at $67.99 and take $7K loss on each contract, which 10x less money than you'd have to pay for the oil you can't take delivery on. This is a "long squeeze", as more people find themselves in such a situation they sell at lower and lower price causing the futures price to tank even more.
Someone causing a long squeeze is, obviously, taking a loss as some legitimate buyers will buy the cheap futures and take delivery but because of the sheer volume of the speculators, a long squeeze is not nearly as expensive as a direct undercutting the spot price and can be maintained for a long time with relatively small capital.