South African rescuers pull 36 corpses, 82 survivors from illegal gold mine

STILFONTEIN, South Africa, Jan 14 (Reuters) – South African rescuers have pulled out 36 dead bodies and 82 survivors from a gold mine deep underground in two days of operations, police said on Tuesday, 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 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 2 km underground, will continue for days, with police saying they would provide a daily update on numbers.

A Reuters team at the site, about 150 km (90 miles) 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 ($3.17 billion) last year.Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said in November: “We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out.”

But a court said in December that volunteers should be allowed to send down supplies to the trapped men, and another ruling last week ordered the state to launch a rescue operation, which began on Monday.

“All 82 that have been arrested are facing illegal mining, trespassing and contravention of the Immigration Act charges,” police said in a statement, referring to all those pulled out alive on Monday and Tuesday.

The statement added that two of them would face additional charges of being in possession of gold.

The government crackdown, part of an operation called “Vala Umgodi” or “Close the hole” in the isiZulu language, has drawn criticism from human rights organisations and local residents.

A 26-year-old woman living near Stilfontein, who gave her name as Matumelo, said her husband had gone down the mine in June when she was pregnant. She last received a letter from him in August and has since given birth.

“My husband, is he alive or dead?” she said, declining to give her family name for fear of retribution from the authorities.

There was a small protest by local residents and rights groups outside the venue where police and mining officials addressed the media on Tuesday. “STOP THE SACRIFICE. #FREETHEMINERS,” read one placard.

($1 = 18.9325 rand)