30 people found dead in abandoned South African mine

The South African government has announced that some 30 illegal miners have been found dead at the bottom of an abandoned mine, a month after reports of an accident in the small gold-mining town of Wellcome, 250 km south of Johannesburg.

South Africa suffers from crippling unemployment and employs thousands of illegal miners, called zama zamas. Some of them also come from Lesotho, a small kingdom surrounded on all sides by South Africa.

They go down to abandoned mines to try to extract precious metals, stones or even coal.

“According to our information, suspected illegal miners helped to retrieve at least three bodies, and 28 others are still underground,” Ernest Mullipana, spokesman for the Ministry of Mines and Energy, told AFP.

“The victims died on 18 May, according to the ministry, which has yet to determine the circumstances of their deaths.”

“Because of the high methane level, it is now dangerous for anyone to go down” to the mine, which operated there until the 1990s, before gold extraction stopped when it was no longer profitable, Mullibana said.