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Volunteers working with rescue teams say there are no more illegal miners at a gold mine in South Africa.
At least 78 bodies and more than 200 survivors have been recovered since Monday after a court ordered the government to facilitate rescue operations at the mine, the site of one of the most unusual tragedies to hit the industry.
Police said they would check to make sure no one was left behind on Thursday when the rescue cage was sent to the mine.
The standoff began in November when the government ordered police to arrest any miners who surfaced, saying it was determined to stop illegal mining.
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During Tuesday’s visit, an angry mob, which blamed the government for the deaths, insulted the police and mines ministers and ordered them to leave.
The police said that before the start of the rescue operation, more than 1,500 miners came to the surface, Reuters reports.
However, others remained underground either because they feared arrest or were forced to stay there by the gangs that control the mine.
A spokesman for the South African Police Service said of the volunteers’ claim that no one was still underground: “We will be looking to the mine rescue service to confirm this with their state-of-the-art equipment, which will hopefully be able to give us a picture of what is going on underground.
“Mining Rescue has confirmed that they will send a cage underground in the morning to see if the illegal miners will surface with the cage. We cannot say with certainty that the operation has been canceled at this stage.”
Many mines in South Africa have been abandoned over the past three decades by companies that did not find them economically viable.
The mines have been taken over by gangs, often ex-employees, who sell the minerals they find on the black market.
This includes a mine in Stilfontein, about 145 km (90 miles) southwest of the country’s largest city, Johannesburg, which has been the focus of government efforts to crack down on the illegal industry.
A rescue cage was lowered down the shaft to reach dozens of miners believed to be at least 2 km (1.2 mi) underground.
Many of the survivors had been without food or water since November, leaving them emaciated. Now they are receiving medical care.
Authorities say they will face charges of illegal mining, trespassing and immigration violations because most of the miners are undocumented migrants from neighboring countries.
“It’s a crime against the economy, it’s an attack on the economy,” Mines Minister Gwede Montashe said on Wednesday, defending the hard line taken against the miners.
South Africa was heavily dependent on miners from countries such as Lesotho and Mozambique before the industry declined.
Unemployment in South Africa is currently over 30% and many former miners say they have few alternative sources of income.
