The death toll in a months-long 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 on Thursday.
Authorities faced growing anger and a possible investigation over their initial refusal to help the miners and instead “smoke them out” by cutting off their food supplies.
National police spokeswoman Athlenda Mathe said that 78 bodies were retrieved in a court-ordered rescue operation, with 246 survivors also pulled out from deep underground since the operation began on Monday.
Ms Mathe said nine other bodies had been recovered before the rescue operation, without giving details.
Community groups launched their own rescue attempts when authorities said last year they would not help the hundreds of miners because they were “criminals”.
South African authorities have been fiercely criticised for cutting off food and supplies to the miners in the Buffelsfontein Gold Mine last year. That tactic to “smoke them out,” as described by a prominent Cabinet minister, was condemned by one of South Africa’s biggest trade unions.
Police and the mine owners were also accused of taking away ropes and dismantling a pulley system the miners used to enter the mine 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 them 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.”
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 working illegally in 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 emerged this week badly emaciated and barely able to walk to waiting ambulances.
A convoy of mortuary vans arrived at the mine to carry away the bodies.
Ms Mathe said at least 13 children had also come out of the mine before the official rescue operation.
Police announced on Wednesday that they were ending that operation after three days and said they believed no one else was underground. A camera was sent down on Thursday in a cage that was used to pull out survivors and bodies to ensure no one was left behind, Ms 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 kilometres (1.5 miles) underground in different groups.
Police have maintained that the miners were able to come out through several shafts but refused out of fear of being arrested. That has been disputed by groups representing the miners, who say hundreds were trapped and left starving in dark and damp conditions 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 to extract any leftover deposits.
Gold-rich South Africa has an estimated 6,000 abandoned or closed mines.
“By providing food, water and necessities to these illegal miners, it would be the police entertaining and allowing criminality to thrive,” Ms Mathe said on Wednesday.
But the South African Federation of Trade Unions questioned the government’s humanity and how it could “allow anyone — be they citizens or undocumented immigrants — to starve to death in the depths of the earth”.
