South African rescuers have pulled 36 bodies and 82 survivors from a gold mine in two days of operations, police say, adding that the survivors would face illegal mining and immigration charges.
After nine bodies were recovered on Monday, 27 more were brought out from deep underground on Tuesday, police Brigadier Athlenda Mathe said in a statement.
Police began laying siege to the mine about 150km (90 miles) southwest of Johannesburg in the town of Stilfontein in August and cut off food and water for months to force the miners to the surface to arrest them as part of a crackdown on illegal mining.
Hundreds more survivors and dozens more bodies are still underground, according to a miners rights group that issued footage on Monday showing corpses and skeletal survivors in the mine.
Rescue operations, which involve the use of a metal cage to recover survivors and bodies from a mine shaft more than 2km (1.2 miles) underground, will continue for days. Police said they would provide a daily update on numbers.
Typically, illegal mining takes place in mines that have been abandoned by companies because they are no longer commercially viable on a large scale.
Unlicensed miners, often immigrants from other African countries, go in to extract whatever is left.
‘A war on the economy’
The South African government has said the siege of the Stilfontein mine is necessary to fight illegal mining, which Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe described as “a war on the economy”.
He estimated that the illicit precious metals trade was worth 60 billion rand ($3.17bn) last year.
Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said in November: “We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out.”
But a court ruled in December that volunteers should be allowed to send down supplies to the trapped men, and another edict last week ordered the state to launch a rescue operation, which began on Monday.
“All 82 that have been arrested are facing illegal mining, trespassing and contravention of the Immigration Act charges,” police said in a statement, referring to all those pulled out alive on Monday and Tuesday.
The statement added that two of them would face additional charges of being in possession of gold.
The government crackdown, part of an operation called “Vala Umgodi” or “Close the Hole” in the isiZulu language, has drawn criticism from human rights organisations and local residents.
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