South Africa's Police Minister Senzo Mchunu, center, visits an abandoned gold mine where miners are rescued from below ground ...

Detained after being accused of controlling the illegal operations at an abandoned gold mine near Stilfontein in South Africa ...

Surviving on a diet of toothpaste and toilet paper, South Africa's notorious "zama-zama" illegal miners continue a weeks-long standoff with police in the darkness of a disused gold mine.

Relatives of miners and community members wait near an opening to a mine shaft in Stilfontein, in South Africa's North West province, Nov. 13, 2024. EMMANUEL CROSET/AFP/Getty ...

STILFONTEIN, South Africa —They look like the walking dead. Dusty men, skin and hair caked in dirt, skeletal. Some struggle to walk and collapse. They blink like moles in the harsh South African ...

Stilfontein gold mine: Why did 87 people die in South Africa? - The tragedy at the abandoned gold mine near Stilfontein began to unfold in August ...

The South African government has launched a rescue operation at an abandoned gold mine in the country’s North West province, where at least 109 men have died, a group representing the miners ...

Last week, rescuers recovered 78 bodies and 246 survivors — many of them weak and emaciated — from the Buffelsfontein mine in Stilfontein, in South Africa’s North West province, where police ...

The blockade of the Stilfontein mine is part of an escalating clampdown by the government and police on the activity of illegal miners in the country. “We’ve got about 6,000 abandoned mines in ...

The Stilfontein mine was being worked by thousands of desperately impoverished people when security forces moved in last summer, as part of the ANC’s Vala Umgodi (Plug the Hole) operation aimed ...

Months after South Africa’s government began an operation to flush out hundreds of people from an illegal gold mine near Johannesburg, police pulled out 60 bodies as part of a search-and-rescue ...

Botman, 48, who serves in the Stilfontein Greater Socioeconomic Empowerment Foundation, said volunteers fed a rope more than a mile deep into the shaft as around 50 people helped to hold it on the ...