Blitz Bureau
BAMAKO: A landslide has engulfed a group of women gold miners in Mali, killing several of them, the office of the Governor of the West African country’s Koulikoro region said, reports africanews.com.
In a statement broadcast on Malian national television, the Governor of Koulikoro, Colonel Lamine Kapory Sanogo, said that “the women (gold panners) were numerous in an excavation looking for gold, and the excavation was surrounded by a dike which gave way and the water came in with the mud and engulfed the women.”
The Governor’s office said in the landslide that happened at the artisanal gold mine in southern Mali, several miners were killed, but did not specify the number of casualties. This is not the first time such accidents have occurred at a gold mine in Mali, which is known as one of the three gold-producing countries in Africa. In January last year, an unregulated gold mine collapsed in Mali, killing more than 70 people near the capital Bamako.
In recent years, there have been concerns that profits from unregulated mining in northern Mali could benefit extremists operating in that part of the country, the website report said. The region where this latest collapse occurred, however, is much further south and closer to Bamako. “Gold is by far Mali’s most important export, accounting for more than 80 pc of total exports in 2021,” according to the US Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration. More than two million people, or more than 10 per cent of Mali’s population, rely on the mining sector for their income.
