BAMAKO (Reuters) – Thirteen artisanal miners, including women and three children, were killed in southwest Mali on Wednesday after a tunnel in which they were digging for gold flooded, the national union of gold counters and refineries (UCROM) said on Saturday.
The incident occurred at an open-pit gold mine near the village of Danga in the Kangaba Cercle in Mali’s southwestern Koulikoro region, UCROM Secretary General Taoule Camara said via telephone.
The sluice gates of a muddy water reservoir broke and spilled into a tunnel in which women and children were digging out earth to search for leftover gold particles.
“It is serious. There were a lot of women. We spent all day yesterday clearing away the water to start looking for the bodies,” Camara said earlier this week, when a death toll was still unavailable.
Artisanal mining is a common activity across much of West Africa and has become more lucrative in recent years due to growing demand for metals and rising prices.
Deadly accidents are frequent as the artisanal miners often use unregulated digging methods.
More than 70 people were killed in January last year after a shaft collapsed at an artisanal gold mining site in the Kangaba Cercle.
(Reporting by Tiemoko Diallo; Writing by Sofia Christensen; Editing by Jan Harvey)
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