The body of the fifth and last missing miner was found on Sunday, days after the collapse of a tunnel at the world’s largest copper mine in .
“Today we finally found [dead] the last of the missing workers,” Aquiles Cubillos, prosecutor for Chile’s O’Higgins region, told reporters.
Rescuers dug two dozen meters (78 feet) of underground passages to retrieve the body of the miners.
How did the miners get trapped?
On Thursday, a part of the El Teniente copper mine collapsed after a 4.2 magnitude tremor, which initially killed one person and injured nine others.
Following the tremors and the partial collapse of the El Teniente tunnel, which trapped five mine workers, operations were suspended at the tunnel.
It is still unknown whether the tremor was due to a natural quake or because of mining activity.
A team of 100 rescue workers tried to search for the missing miners.
State-run mining firm Codelco, which operates the tunnels, discovered on Saturday and .
Codelco Chairman Maximo Pacheco said the miner would convene international experts to probe and determine “what we did wrong.”
“This tragedy hits us hard,” Pacheco told reporters at Codelco’s offices in the city ofRancagua, near the mine in central Chile.
Chile’s mining industry is one of the safest in the world, with a fatality rate of 0.02% last year, according to the National Geology and Mining Service of Chile.
Edited by: Rana Taha
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