Source : NEW INDIAN EXPRESS NEWS
Authorities now believe that nearly 2,000 miners were underground working illegally at the mine near the town of Stilfontein, southwest of Johannesburg, since August last year. Many of them resurfaced on their own over the last few months, police said, and all the survivors have been arrested, even as some of them emerged appearing badly emaciated and barely able to walk as they were helped to ambulances.
Mathe said at least 13 children had also come out of the mine before the official rescue operation, which authorities had declined to launch for months.
Police announced Wednesday that they were ending that rescue operation after three days and believed no one else was underground. A camera would be sent down on Thursday in a cage that has been used to pull out survivors and bodies to make certain no one was still down there, Mathe said.
The mine is one of the deepest in South Africa and is a maze of tunnels and levels and has several shafts leading into it. The miners were working up to 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) underground in different groups.
Police have maintained that the miners were able to come out through several different shafts but refused out of fear of being arrested. That’s been disputed by groups representing the miners, who say hundreds were trapped and left starving in grim conditions underground with decomposing bodies around them.
The initial police operation last year to force the miners to come out and give themselves up for arrest was part of a larger nationwide clampdown on illegal mining called Vala Umgodi, or Close the Hole. Illegal mining is often in the news in South Africa and a major problem for authorities as large groups go into mines that have been shut down by companies to extract any leftover deposits.
The miners, known as “zama zamas” — “hustlers” or “chancers” in the Zulu language — are often armed and part of criminal syndicates, the government says, and they rob South Africa of more than $1 billion a year in gold deposits. They are often undocumented foreign nationals and authorities said Thursday that the vast majority of miners who came out of the Buffelsfontein mine were from Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Lesotho and in South Africa illegally.
Police said they seized gold, explosives, firearms and more than $2 million in cash from the miners and have defended their hardline approach.
“By providing food, water and necessities to these illegal miners, it would be the police entertaining and allowing criminality to thrive,” Mathe said Wednesday.
And while the police operation has been condemned by civic groups and others, the disaster hasn’t provoked a strong outpouring of anger across South Africa, where the zama zamas have long been considered especially troublesome in a country that struggles with high rates of violent crime.
SOURCE :- NEW INDIAN EXPRESS
