Sixty bodies of illegal miners were extracted in two days from an abandoned gold pit in South Africa, police announced on Wednesday. The police have surrounded the site for months and prevented its supply to dislodge the illegal workers, who refuse to leave.
“On the second day of operations, 106 living illegal miners 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 emergency response.
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. The operation must last ten days in total to extract an unknown number of “zama zamas”, as illegal miners are called in South Africa. The police had mentioned several hundred of them when they began to prevent supplies from the site more than two months ago.
Police Minister Senzo Mchunu, visiting Stilfontein on Tuesday, did not wish to give precise figures on the total number of miners present underground. “Every number we have here is an estimate, a guess,” he said. “It’s impossible for someone to tell us, ‘I know for sure there are so many of them’.”
Dozens of remains packed in the dark
A video transmitted 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 on the site by the police since last August.
Among them, “121 illegal miners have already been expelled, including 80 Mozambicans, 30 Basotho [du Lesotho, ndlr]10 Zimbabweans and one Malawian”, identified the South African authorities. The men with emaciated faces who came out of the well on Tuesday appeared particularly weakened. They were subjected to a search with a metal detector by the police to ensure that they were not no gold nuggets came up from the basement.
“We’ll smoke them out and they’ll come out.”
The authorities have been accused of trying to force the miners to come to the surface of what looked like a small underground city by reducing the food and water supplies brought by relatives who live in the informal economy since the beginning of November. around the mine.
“We will smoke them out and they will come out,” said the minister to the presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, in November, provoking indignant reactions.
ats/vic
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