Zambia: emergency services fail to locate missing miners

Emergency services dispatched to help around thirty illegal miners, missing for two days in a mudslide in Zambia, have been unable to locate them, the government reported.

The Minister of the Interior announced on Friday that at least 30 miners were trapped in a torrent of mud, caused by torrential rains, in an open-cast copper mine located in the Chingola region, around 400 km north of the capital Lusaka.

On Sunday, Zambian Vice-President Mutale Nalumango, referring to a "catastrophe", indicated in a statement that despite relief operations "day and night", "the search and assistance team did not have to "Today located none of the trapped miners, whose fate remains unknown . "

The vice president specified that the search was concentrated in three places at the artisanal mining site, where hundreds of illegal miners usually dig the earth to extract copper.

The police communicated the names of seven missing miners while recognizing that the list was not exhaustive. The mining site was invaded by a mudslide at 2 a.m. Friday, the vice president said, without giving further details.

Zambia is one of the largest copper producers in the world. In the Chingola region, there is one of the largest open-cast copper mines in the world and some of the hills formed from mine waste are around a hundred meters high.