Rescue workers on Saturday recovered more bodies of miners killed in a landslide at an illegal gold mine in western Colombia, raising the death toll to 10, with six more feared dead.
The latest bodies were taken out in white plastic bags and transferred to the nearby town of Santander de Quilichao in Cauca Department.
Red Cross official Carlos Ivan Marquez confirmed the toll from the landslide on Wednesday last week.
Photo: AFP
Rescuers on Friday said they believe they have located bodies of the missing about 30m below the surface with the aid of sniffer dogs.
Anguished relatives looked on from behind a security perimeter as half a dozen backhoes clawed at the earth to try to get to the missing.
Rescuers also donned white masks to protect themselves against the stench of decaying bodies that has begun to permeate the air.
Photo: AFP
“I’m waiting for them to retrieve my brother and his wife, who are buried below,” one miner at the site said.
Another man surveying the recovery operation, Jesus Ovidio Carabali, 60, said five of his nephews had perished in the pit below.
“I warned them not [to] get involved” with the mining operation, he said.
“Now at least, they’re beginning to be freed” from beneath the mountains of mud, Carabali added.
Miners had been laboring with hand tools to extract gold from the open pit mine when it was hit by an avalanche of mud, rock and earth.
The mine employed local men and women, sometimes from the same families, but neither the workers nor the facility had the proper credentials, officials said.
Colombia has more than 14,000 mines, more than half of which operate without proper permits, officials said. The Colombian government has even confiscated heavy excavation equipment at some illegal sites.
Wednesday’s collapse was the second mining accident in Colombia in less than a week, following an incident in the northwestern department of Antioquia in which four miners died from inhaling toxic gas in an unlicensed mine.
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