SHENDI, Sudan — The death toll from the collapse of an informal gold mine in a remote area of Sudan has risen to 82, according to local officials and activists, as rescuers struggled on Wednesday to search for the missing with limited equipment.
It’s the latest tragedy in a nation mired in a devastating war.
Survivors said that the collapse happened at the al-Zara gold mine, in Nuhud, a town in West Kordofan province, which is controlled by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF. The group has been fighting against the Sudanese military for more than three years.
Suleiman Abu Hmeida, a member of the Emergency Response Rooms, said that rescuers pulled out 82 bodies by Wednesday afternoon. “But dozens remain unaccounted for,” Abu Hmeida told The Associated Press.
The Emergency Response Rooms is a grassroots network that monitors the conflict and provides support for communities across war-torn Sudan.
A local administration official also said that 82 bodies were recovered.
The official said that the collapse began on Sunday in one of the mine shafts and spread to the other interconnected shafts. He said that only one privately owned forklift is available for the rescue efforts, complicating the search for survivors.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media.
“The collapse is massive and the situation is very dire,” Khairal-Sayed Gabara, one of the survivors, told the AP when reached by phone. He said that the machinery needed to remove the collapsed soil and rubble wasn’t available.
“We do not have the machinery to lift dirt and stones and search for survivors at depths of more than 30 meters (around 100 feet),” he said. “There were dozens of people working in the mine.”
The al-Zara gold mine is one of thousands of small-scale and informal mines scattered across Sudan, which has been engulfed in a war that has at times pushed parts of the country into famine.
Despite being a major gold producer, deadly mine collapses in Sudan aren’t uncommon in a country where safety standards aren’t widely applied. A 2023 collapse killed 14 miners and one in 2021 claimed 38 lives.
Al-Amin Suliman, another survivor, said that 60 bodies had been recovered as of Wednesday morning.
“There are still people stuck inside,” he said.
The Sudan Doctors Network, a medical group tracking the war in Sudan, reported earlier that 67 bodies were pulled from the rubble, predicting that the death toll could increase as rescuers continued their search. The group said that the mine — an informal site that employs unregulated workers — lacked basic safety and protective measures.
Earlier, survivors reached by phone and the physicians network said that the tragedy took place on Tuesday evening.
The Kordofan Observatory monitoring group said that at least 70 miners were killed or missing at the site, which stretches more than a kilometer (around a half-mile) across a wide swath of fragile, sandy soil. It described the miners as unregulated and informal workers.
Large quantities of gold have been smuggled out of the country to finance the RSF, which controls gold-producing areas in the Darfur and Kordofan regions, according to experts commissioned by the United Nations.
Sudan plunged into an all-out war in April 2023 as fighting erupted between the RSF and the Sudanese military in the country.
The conflict has killed at least 59,000 people, according to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a monitoring group. Aid organizations say that the figure is an undercount, and the true number could be many times higher.
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Samy Magdy contributed to this report from Cairo.