A gold mine shaft collapsed in Sudan’s Red Sea state, killing at least 11 miners and injuring 30. The second such disaster in a week has intensified scrutiny of unsafe informal mining amid war and weak oversight.
At least 11 miners were killed and 30 others were injured after a gold mine shaft collapsed in northeastern Sudan, according to a state official. A search operation was continuing for people feared trapped under the debris.
The collapse is the second such incident at an informal gold mine in Sudan within a week. The country has thousands of small-scale and informal mines and has been engulfed in war, which has at times pushed parts of Sudan into famine.
The latest collapse took place in Oni, a remote area in the northeastern Red Sea state. Abdalhay Kharif Abakar, who worked in the area, said the collapse began on Saturday night. An official from the state-owned Sudanese Mineral Resources Company said 11 bodies had been recovered by Sunday and 30 people had been rescued. The search for missing miners was still under way, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
In a statement, the company expressed condolences over the loss of life in the mine collapse, but did not give details of the casualties. Deadly mine collapses are not uncommon in Sudan, a gold-producing country where safety standards are not widely followed.
Last Sunday, at least 82 people were killed when a series of mine shafts collapsed at another gold mine in western Sudan, in an area controlled by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The RSF has been fighting the Sudanese military for more than three years.
Sudan plunged into full-scale war in April 2023 after fighting broke out between the RSF and the Sudanese military. The conflict has killed at least 59,000 people, according to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a monitoring group. Aid organisations say the toll is an undercount and the real number could be many times higher. According to experts commissioned by the United Nations, large quantities of gold have been smuggled out of Sudan to finance the RSF, which controls gold-producing areas in Darfur and Kordofan.
The latest mine collapse has added to the death toll from unsafe mining in Sudan, where conflict, weak oversight and informal extraction continue to put lives at risk.
With PTI Inputs
