Gold mine collapse in northeast Sudan kills at least 11

SHENDI, Sudan (AP) — A gold mine shaft collapsed in northeastern Sudan, killing at least 11 miners and injuring 30, a state official said Sunday, while a search continued for the missing under the debris.

It was the second collapse of an informal gold mine in Sudan in a week.

The mines are among thousands of small-scale and informal mines scattered across Sudan, which has been engulfed in a war that has at times pushed parts of the country into famine.

Last Sunday, at least 82 people were killed when a series of mine shafts in another gold mine collapsed in the country’s west, in an area controlled by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces that have been fighting the Sudanese military for over three years.

Abdalhay Kharif Abakar, who worked in the area, said the collapse in Oni, a remote area in the northeastern Red Sea state, began Saturday night.

An official from the state-owned Sudanese Mineral Resources Co. said 11 bodies had been recovered by Sunday and 30 were rescued. The search for the missing continued, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

In a statement, the company expressed condolences for lives lost in the mine collapse, but didn’t give details about the casualties.

Deadly mine collapses in Sudan, a gold producing country, aren’t uncommon where safety standards aren’t widely applied.

Sudan plunged into an all-out war in April 2023 as fighting erupted between the RSF and the Sudanese military in the country.

The conflict has killed at least 59,000 people, according to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a monitoring group. Aid organizations say that the figure is an undercount, and the true number could be many times higher.

Large quantities of gold have been smuggled out of the country to finance the RSF, which controls gold-producing areas in the Darfur and Kordofan regions, according to experts commissioned by the United Nations.