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The survivors come out half dead. They pulled out 36 bodies of illegal miners from a closed gold mine in South Africa

“They are very sick. They are very dehydrated. You can see that they are almost dying,” Johannes Qankase, the leader of the local community, described the condition of the rescued people to the AFP agency on Tuesday.

Last week, a letter from one of the hiding illegal miners was published, stating that there are at least 109 dead in the underground shafts. Footage was also released that showed a number of bodies wrapped in plastic bags and among them emaciated survivors in darkened shafts. The number of people in the mine is unclear, but even the lowest estimates speak of hundreds of people.

Horror in a closed mine. Illegal miners in South Africa are underground for the second month, there are over a hundred dead

The world

The police repeatedly state a lower number of victims and the number of people remaining below the surface than what activists and relatives of illegal miners report. They also claim that the police at the entrances are preventing some from leaving the mines, although according to the police, roughly 1,500 people have voluntarily come to the surface.

The drama began in mid-November, when the South African authorities cordoned off the entrances to closed mines used for illegal mining. Since then, they refuse to help the miners under the surface in any way – with the fact that they do not prevent them from leaving the underground in any way. However, if they do, they will be arrested for illegal mining.

According to the South African Minerals Commission, miners can spend months in the mines, some tunnels are kilometers long, CNN reported some time ago. Illegal mining is a long-term problem in South Africa. Miners, often exploited people from the surrounding countries, work under terrible conditions in old mines in which they search for remaining deposits of gold and other precious minerals.

Due to the conditions in the mines, even deaths are not exceptional, two years ago the police found the bodies of 21 dead miners near Johannesburg, reported the AP agency.

You shouldn’t have climbed there! The police in South Africa let several thousand miners starve in an illegal mine

Foreign