Sixty bodies of illegal miners were extracted in two days from a disused gold pit in South Africaannounced Wednesday the police who have surrounded the site for months to dislodge the illegal workers.
“On the second day of operations, 106 illegal miners alive were recovered and arrested for illegal mining. 51 were declared dead”, said the police in a press release, who had already recovered nine remains on Monday, the first day of a rescue intervention.
The gondola, lowered by means of a specialized winch into a 2.6 km deep well, resumed its return trips on Wednesday to Stilfontein, about 150 km southwest of Johannesburg. A previous police report on Tuesday afternoon noted 36 bodies extracted since the day before.
The operation must last ten days in total to bring out of the ground an unknown number of “to stay”, as illegal miners are called in South Africa.
The police mentioned several hundred of them when they began to restrict supplies to the site more than two months ago.
Police Minister Senzo Mchunu, visiting Stilfontein on Tuesday, did not wish to give a precise figure.
“Every number we have here is an estimate, a guess,” he declared. “It’s impossible for anyone to tell us. I know for sure that there are so many.”
“We’ll smoke them out and they’ll come out.”
A video sent to AFP on Monday by the NGO Macua, which defends communities affected by mining activities, showed what appeared to be dozens of remains packed in the darkness of the galleries.
More than 1,500 illegal miners, most of them foreigners, have been arrested at the site by police since August.
Among them, “121 illegal miners have already been deported, including 80 Mozambicans, 30 Basotho, 10 Zimbabweans and one Malawian,” have identified the South African authorities.
The men with emaciated faces who came out of the well on Tuesday appeared particularly weakened. They were subject to a metal detector search by the police to ensure that they did not bring up any gold nuggets from the basement.
Authorities have been accused of trying to force miners to the surface of what looked like a small underground city, by reducing food and water supplies brought by relatives who make a living from the economy since early November. informal around the mine.
“We’ll smoke them out and they’ll come out,” Minister to the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni launched in November, sparking outraged reactions.
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