Written by Siyabonga Sishi and Nellie Peyton

STELfontein, South Africa (Reuters) – South African rescuers made their final efforts on Thursday to ascertain whether anyone remained in an illegal gold mine deep underground where at least 78 people died during a police siege, as A labor union described it as a horrific accident. Sponsored massacre.

Police have cordoned off the mine since August and cut off food and water supplies in an attempt to force miners to the surface so they can be arrested as part of a crackdown on illegal mining, which the government calls a war on the economy.

Since Monday, rescuers have used a cylindrical metal cage to recover 78 bodies and 246 survivors, some emaciated and disfigured, in a court-ordered operation.

The survivors, most of whom were from Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Lesotho, were arrested and charged with illegal immigration and mining.

Trade union GIWUSA described the events at the Stilfontein mine, southwest of Johannesburg, as “the worst state-sponsored massacre since the end of apartheid.”

“These miners died en masse due to a series of decisions and brutal repression by the police executive, with the approval and acclamation of the political establishment and the highest levels of the state,” she said late on Wednesday evening.

At the site on Thursday morning, the cage was lowered with no one in it but a camera, which police described as a way to verify information from volunteers who descended on Wednesday evening and said they could not see anyone in the mine.

Throughout the rescue, the police and contractors running the cage were not lowering themselves, but instead relied on community volunteers in the local town where most of the unregistered miners live.

Police did not explain why they did not go down themselves, but Manas Vori, CEO of the rescue services company involved in the operation, said it was better for volunteers to go because they knew the miners and could gain their trust.

“There is also a danger that ransom for our people could be taken,” he told Reuters at the scene.

There is no way to know if the bodies were lost underground

Fouri said that the volunteers went down to a depth of 2,200 meters into the well, and there was only water at this depth.

Asked if there were still bodies in the tunnels, he said: “It’s difficult to confirm. If someone gets lost, you never know if someone is left behind.”

GIWASU president Mamitloe Sibe claimed that during the siege, police removed the pulley system that miners had previously used to get in and out, leaving them no realistic prospect of getting out safely.

Sippy, who was present at the Stilfontein site, said several miners died crawling through the flooded tunnels trying to reach another shaft to exit.

Police denied that they prevented the workers from leaving and said that more than 1,500 workers left by their own means between the beginning of the siege in August and the rescue operation that began on Monday.

Police spokeswoman Athlinda Mathie said only two of the 78 bodies recovered so far had been identified because many of the illegal miners were undocumented and some of the bodies were decomposed.

As the death toll rose during the three days of rescue, criticism of the authorities increased, but the government defended its measures as necessary to protect the economy and combat crime. The illicit precious metals trade cost South Africa more than $3 billion last year, the mines minister said.

Mathi said police were trying to identify the gang leaders behind illegal mining in Stilfontein, and he hoped they would be arrested soon.

Illegal mining is common in parts of gold-rich South Africa. Typically, unregistered miners known as zama zamas – an isiZulu expression meaning “seize opportunity” – move into mines abandoned by commercial miners and seek to extract what remains. Some are controlled by violent criminal gangs.

Of the 246 survivors recovered from Monday to Wednesday, nine were taken to hospital for medical treatment and were under police guard, Mathi said. The others were in detention.