South African rescuers have pulled out 36 bodies and 82 survivors from a gold mine deep underground in two days of operations, police said, adding that the survivors would all face illegal mining and immigration charges.
Police began laying siege to the mine in August and cut off food and water supplies for months in an attempt to force the miners to the surface so they could be arrested as part of a crackdown on illegal mining.
Hundreds more men and dozens more bodies are still trapped underground, according to a miners’ rights group that issued footage on Monday showing corpses and skeletal survivors in the mine.
Rescue operations, which involve the use of a metal cage to recover men and bodies from a mine shaft more than 2km underground, will continue for days, with police saying they would provide a daily update on numbers.
A Reuters team at the site, about 150km from Johannesburg in the town of Stilfontein, saw rescuers carrying one man on a stretcher on Tuesday. A group of other men, one of them emaciated, sat on the ground surrounded by uniformed police officers and paramedics.
Typically, illegal mining takes place in mines that have been abandoned by companies because they are no longer commercially viable on a large scale. Unlicensed miners, often immigrants from other African countries, go in to extract whatever is left.
The South African government has said the siege of the Stilfontein mine was necessary to fight illegal mining, which Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe described as “a war on the economy.” He estimated that the illicit precious metals trade was worth 60 billion rand (US$3.17 billion) last year.
