KINSHASA, Sept 12 (NNN-Xinhua) — At least 50 people are feared dead after a gold mine collapsed in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, local authorities said Saturday.
The accident occurred on Friday afternoon in the town of Kamituga in South Kivu province following heavy rains.
Photos and videos on social media showed hundreds of people, some of whom could be heard wailing on a hillside around the mine-shaft entrance.
Provincial governor Theo Ngwabidje Kasi deplored “the tragic deaths of 50 people, most of them young”, while Kamituga mayor Alexandre Bundya said “we are not yet sure of the exact number” of victims.
“Several miners were in the well which was buried and no one was able to get out. We’re talking about fifty young people, ”said Emiliane Itongwa, president of the Women’s Social Support and Supervision Initiative.
Most of them are set up in the eastern province of Katanga, the same region that was at the heart of a bloody civil war in the early 1960s when it tried to break away from the newly decolonised DRC.
Under its soil lies some of the largest, purest deposits of copper and cobalt, which now make up almost 90 per cent of the DRC’s exports.
Mining accidents are common in unregulated artisanal mines in Congo, with dozens of deaths every year in mines where often ill-equipped diggers borrow deep underground in search for ore.
A landslide at a disused gold mine killed 16 in October last year, while 43 clandestine miners died in another landslide at a copper and cobalt mine in June 2019. — NNN-AGENCIES
