Death toll rises to 87 as standoff between police and miners ends in South Africa

The death toll in a monthslong standoff between police and miners trapped while working illegally in an abandoned gold mine in South Africa has risen to at least 87, police said today (16 January) as they wound down a rescue operation that has pulled more than 240 survivors out from deep underground.

National police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe said that 78 bodies were retrieved from the mine in an official rescue operation that began Monday, while another nine had been recovered previously. She did not give details on how those other bodies were retrieved.

Community groups have said they launched their own rescue attempts when authorities said last year they would not help the hundreds of miners because they were "criminals."

The miners are suspected to have died of starvation and dehydration, although no causes of death have been released.

South African authorities have been criticized for their approach, having cut off food and supplies to the miners for a period of time last year in an attempt, as one Cabinet minister said, to "smoke them out" of the Buffelsfontein Gold Mine. That tactic has been called "horrific" by one of South Africa's biggest trade unions.

Police and the mine owners are also accused by community members and civic groups of taking away ropes and dismantling a pulley system the miners used to enter the mine through one shaft and send supplies down from the surface.

A court ordered authorities last year to allow food and water to be sent down to the miners, while another court ruling last week forced the government to launch a rescue operation.

Many say the unfolding disaster underground was clear weeks ago, when community members sporadically pulled decomposing bodies out of the mine, some with notes attached pleading for food to be sent down.

"If the police had acted earlier, we would not be in this situation, with bodies piling up," said Johannes Qankase, a local community leader. "It is a disgrace for a constitutional democracy like ours. Somebody needs to account for what has happened here."

He said he was saddened "seeing so many pathology vans coming to get bodies of dead people."

South Africa's second biggest political party, which is part of a government coalition, called for President Cyril Ramaphosa to establish an independent inquiry to find out "why the situation was allowed to get so badly out of hand."

"The scale of the disaster underground at Buffelsfontein is rapidly proving to be as bad as feared," the Democratic Alliance party said.

Authorities now believe that nearly 2,000 miners were underground working illegally at the mine near the town of Stilfontein, southwest of Johannesburg, since August last year. Many of them resurfaced on their own over the last few months, police said, and all the survivors have been arrested, even as some of them emerged appearing badly emaciated and barely able to walk as they were helped to ambulances.

Mathe said at least 13 children had also come out of the mine before the official rescue operation, which authorities had declined to launch for months.

Police announced Wednesday that they were ending that rescue operation after three days and believed no one else was underground. A camera would be sent down on Thursday in a cage that has been used to pull out survivors and bodies to make certain no one was still down there, Mathe said.

The mine is one of the deepest in South Africa and is a maze of tunnels and levels and has several shafts leading into it. The miners were working up to 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) underground in different groups.

Police have maintained that the miners were able to come out through several different shafts but refused out of fear of being arrested. That's been disputed by groups representing the miners, who say hundreds were trapped and left starving in grim conditions underground with decomposing bodies around them.

The initial police operation last year to force the miners to come out and give themselves up for arrest was part of a larger nationwide clampdown on illegal mining called Vala Umgodi, or Close the Hole. Illegal mining is often in the news in South Africa and a major problem for authorities as large groups go into mines that have been shut down by companies to extract any leftover deposits.

The miners, known as "zama zamas" — "hustlers" or "chancers" in the Zulu language — are often armed and part of criminal syndicates, the government says, and they rob South Africa of more than $1 billion a year in gold deposits. They are often undocumented foreign nationals and authorities said Thursday that the vast majority of miners who came out of the Buffelsfontein mine were from Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Lesotho and in South Africa illegally.

Police said they seized gold, explosives, firearms and more than $2 million in cash from the miners and have defended their hardline approach.

"By providing food, water and necessities to these illegal miners, it would be the police entertaining and allowing criminality to thrive," Mathe said Wednesday.

And while the police operation has been condemned by civic groups and others, the disaster hasn't provoked a strong outpouring of anger across South Africa, where the zama zamas have long been considered especially troublesome in a country that struggles with high rates of violent crime.