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Volunteer rescue workers and community members leave the area near a closed mine where illegal miners are inside in Stilfontein, South Africa, Thursday, Nov. 14, 2024. - Jerome Delay/AP
A South African court ordered police to end a standoff with illegal miners to allow emergency workers to gain access to a mine shaft where several hundred are believed to remain after the ...
STILFONTEIN, South Africa (Reuters) -Desperate relatives of possibly hundreds of illegal miners stuck underground in a disused mine shaft in South Africa waited outside the site on Friday in the ...
Illegal gold miners, commonly referred to as "zama zamas", operate in abandoned mine shafts and use the empty gas cylinders, known as "phendukas", to process the stolen ore. The cylinders, often stolen, are first drained of gas, then cut open so that ore can be placed in them along with a steel ball which crushes the ore as the cylinder is rotated.
South Africa's illegal miners – called zama zamas, or "take a chance" in colloquial Zulu – are estimated to number more than 50,000, a tenfold increase in two decades.
South African authorities have for years struggled to stop groups of miners from going into some of the gold-rich country's 6,000 abandoned or closed mines to search for leftover deposits. According to officials, South Africa lost more than $3 billion in gold to the illicit trade last year.
These include a rescue mission at Langlaagte Mine in 2016, [25] the deaths of over 70 mine workers in Welkom in 2016 [26] and the deaths of 31 miners in Virginia in 2023. [ 27 ] The deaths of 17 people due to a gas leak at the Angelo informal settlement in Boksburg in July 2023 also exposed the nature and extent of the illegal mining crisis in ...
South Africa's government says it will let thousands of illegal miners starve until they accept their fate and emerge from an abandoned shaft to face arrest. South Africa is trying to starve 4,000 ...