South Africa arrests over 100 illegal miners after underground rescue

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South African officials have arrested more than 100 miners who had been trapped in an illegal gold mine and will detain hundreds more still stuck underground, the country’s mining minister said, despite a judge’s warning that the ordeal risks turning into “the darkest point” in the country’s history following dozens of deaths.

The miners, who entered the 2km deep shaft after being recruited or coerced by violent gang leaders, are “criminals and they must be arrested”, Gwede Mantashe, the minister of mineral and petroleum resources, told the Financial Times.

An operation to rescue the miners from the Buffelsfontein mine, 160km west of Johannesburg, began on Monday after a judge ordered authorities to act on humanitarian grounds. Harrowing accounts have emerged of their ordeal, which is believed to have left more than 100 dead.

As of Wednesday morning, 106 men had been rescued alive and 60 corpses brought up. All the men were arrested.

Mantashe said the state did not have a duty to help anyone committing illegal activities. “Next, we’ll be asked to rescue those who commit cash heists. They voluntarily entered a dangerous space,” he said.

The miners have been trapped underground since August, with authorities cutting the rudimentary pulley system used for entering and sending food and supplies down in an attempt to “smoke out” the group, estimated at between 400 and 900 people.

The tense stand-off has spotlighted the surge in unlawful mining and the inability of South Africa, once the world’s top gold producer, to tackle entrenched organised crime in a country where the official unemployment rate is 33 per cent.

About 6,000 commercial mines have closed since apartheid and many have been taken over by violent gangs, who compete against each other to smuggle the precious metal, in turf wars that have intensified as gold prices have risen to record highs. Illegal mining drains the economy of as much as $1bn annually, according to researchers at the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Alongside South Africans, thousands of impoverished miners, known as zama zamas — Zulu for “take a chance” — come from neighbouring countries Lesotho, Zambia and Mozambique. Gang leaders force them to spend weeks or months at a time inside the mines before they are allowed to resurface.

Family and community members have banded together at the Buffelsfontein mine, using a makeshift pulley to send down food packages and lift some of the miners out in painstaking manual rescues that take up to four hours at a time.

Video and letters from two men rescued last week indicated the scale of the humanitarian disaster underground, with unverified footage showing emaciated figures and what appeared to be dead bodies wrapped in bloodied makeshift shrouds.

According to court affidavits, the miners said they were “living a fearful existence”, asking for batteries for their headlamps and washing powder and charcoal to neutralise the smell of the decomposing bodies. 

In her ruling ordering the rescue on Friday, Judge Ronel Tolmay said “we do not want a situation where this will be marked as the darkest point in our history”, adding that it was “immoral” not to deliver food and water to the miners.

She suggested the government pay the estimated R12mn ($634,000) needed for the rescue, which is being conducted by the private Mine Rescue Services.

The government was “helping Mine Rescue Services to continue the rescue operation”, even though it believed the owner of that mine should pay for the operation, Mantashe added.

Mametlwe Sebei, the leader of a union group camped outside the mine, said the rescue could take up to three weeks, starting by sending food, water and medication to the miners. Specialised equipment would need to be transported to the shafts, which may require building an access path.

The situation was a “massacre” brought about by mine owners and officials, Sebei said, because “every action, the calculations, the decisions . . . could not have had any other consequence than to kill the miners”.

Last week, the trapped men delivered two handwritten notes up to family members using a rope, saying “people around us are dying by the hour and currently, 109 people have died”.

In legal papers filed in last weekend’s court action, Pieter Alberts, chief director of legal services in the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy, said the police acted “lawfully” in the face of a “well-organised criminal gang” armed with automatic weapons.

But Mzukisi Jam, the leader of a community organisation, said the government had failed in its constitutional duties: “We are champions of human rights globally, we have a constitution that’s celebrated globally . . . yet we don’t extend the same courtesy for our own people.”