South Africa accused of ‘horrific’ crackdown as 78 corpses pulled from illegal mine

STILFONTEIN, South Africa — At least 78 dead bodies have been pulled from an illegal gold mine in South Africa where police cut off food and water supplies for months, in what trade unions called a “horrific” crackdown on desperate people trying to eke out a living.

A total of 246 survivors, some of them emaciated and disorientated, have been brought to the surface and immediately arrested for illegal mining and immigration since a court-ordered rescue operation began on Monday.

Volunteers who went down to the mine, located 2 km (1.5 miles) underground near Stilfontein, southwest of Johannesburg, told police late on Wednesday they could not see anyone left in the tunnels, a police spokesperson told reporters at the site.

Rescuers would keep working on Thursday to make sure all bodies and survivors had been recovered, the spokesperson said. Earlier, there were fears dozens or even hundreds more men could still be trapped.

The South African Federation of Trade Unions accused the state on Tuesday of allowing miners “to starve to death in the depths of the earth”.

“These miners, many of them undocumented and desperate workers from Mozambique and other Southern African countries, were left to die in one of the most horrific displays of state wilful negligence in recent history,” it said in a statement.

Mametlwe Sebei, a trade union leader who has been trying to help the miners, said police had begun attempting to force the miners up to the surface in August by removing a pulley system used to deliver food and water supplies to them.

Sebei said some miners had died crawling through flooded tunnels in an attempt to reach shafts that would have allowed them to climb out.

Police said 1,576 miners had got out by their own means between August and the start of the rescue operation. All were arrested and 121 of them have already been deported, they said.

“We’ve never blocked any shafts. We’ve never blocked anyone from coming out,” said Athlenda Mathe, national spokesperson for the South African police, speaking at the site earlier on Wednesday.

“Our mandate was to combat criminality and that is exactly what we’ve been doing,” she said.

“By providing food, water and necessities to these illegal miners it would be the police entertaining and allowing criminality to thrive.”