By Siyabonga Sishi
STILFONTEIN, South Africa (Reuters) – South African police lowered a camera down more than a mile (1.5 km) underground into an illegal gold mine on Thursday to ascertain if any survivors or corpses were still there after a months-long siege by authorities in which at least 78 miners died.
The corpses and 246 survivors, some of them emaciated and disorientated, have been brought to the surface over three days of a court-ordered rescue operation.
Police had cut off food and water supplies since August in what they said was a necessary crackdown on illegal mining.
The siege of the mine near Stilfontein, southwest of Johannesburg, is one of the deadliest on illegal miners in recent South African history.
Trade unions have called the tactics the government has used “horrific” and accused it of allowing police to starve to death desperate people trying to eke out a living.
Only two of the 78 retrieved bodies have been identified so far because many of the illegal miners were undocumented and some of the bodies had decomposed, police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe said.
Volunteers who had gone down to the mine told police on Wednesday that they could not see anyone dead or alive left in the tunnels after they inspected the whole shaft.
Police said they were seeking to verify that on Thursday using the cylindrical metal cage they have been using to retrieve miners and corpses.
“We took the decision for the cage to go down this morning again to check on whether what they (the volunteers) are telling us is indeed true,” Mathe told reporters at the mine.
As the death toll has mounted, so has criticism of the authorities, though the government has defended its actions as necessary to protect the economy and combat crime. The mines minister has said the illicit precious metals trade cost South Africa more than $3 billion last year.
Mathe said police were trying to identify the kingpins behind the illegal mining at Stilfontein and hoped there would be arrests soon.
‘CLOSE THE HOLE’
Illegal mining is common in parts of gold-rich South Africa. Typically, undocumented miners known as zama zamas – from an isiZulu expression for “taking a chance” – move into mines abandoned by commercial miners and seek to extract whatever is left. Some are under the control of violent criminal gangs.
Mathe said there would be no let-up in the government’s crackdown on illegal mining, an operation called “Close the Hole”.
Of the 246 survivors brought to the surface from Monday to Wednesday, nine had been hospitalised for medical treatment and were under police guard, Mathe said.
Police started besieging the Stilfontein mine in August, when they removed a pulley system that was being used to bring supplies of food and water up and down, in an attempt to force the miners to the surface.
Police say they never stopped anyone from coming out or blocked any mine shafts but that providing supplies to illegal miners would be allowing criminality to thrive.
(Additional reporting by Bhargav Acharya and Sfundo Parakozov in Johannesburg; Writing by Alexander Winning, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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