At least \u200b14 suspected illegal miners were killed and \u200ceight injured when a mine dump collapsed in South Africa’s North West province on Monday night, \u200bpolice said.<\/p>\n
Search and rescue operations were under \u200bway for an unknown number of people \u2060who may still be trapped at \u200bthe site near Rustenburg, provincial police commissioner Arthur \u200bPeter Adams said.<\/p>\n
The collapse occurred as the miners were digging for platinum group metals at a disused \u200bdump on a private company’s site, Adams \u200bsaid.<\/p>\n
The injured miners are from the Southern African country of \u200cLesotho, \u2060while the nationality of those killed has yet to be confirmed.<\/p>\n
Illegal mining has plagued South Africa for decades, ranging from small-scale \u200btheft to operations \u200brun by \u2060organised criminal networks.<\/p>\n
Undocumented miners often enter abandoned commercial mines to extract \u200bremaining deposits, sometimes under the control \u200bof \u2060violent gangs.<\/p>\n
Illegal mining costs the government and mining industry hundreds of millions of dollars each \u2060year \u200bin lost sales, taxes \u200band royalties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At least \u200b14 suspected illegal miners were killed and \u200ceight injured when a mine dump collapsed in South Africa’s North West province on Monday night, \u200bpolice said. Search and rescue operations were under \u200bway for an unknown number of people \u2060who may still be trapped at \u200bthe site near Rustenburg, provincial police commissioner Arthur \u200bPeter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":14178,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":7,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"format":"standard","override":[{"template":"1","parallax":"1","fullscreen":"1","layout":"right-sidebar","sidebar":"default-sidebar","second_sidebar":"default-sidebar","sticky_sidebar":"1","share_position":"top","share_float_style":"share-monocrhome","show_featured":"1","show_post_meta":"1","show_post_author_image":"1","show_post_date":"1","post_date_format":"default","post_date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","show_post_reading_time":"0","post_reading_time_wpm":"300","post_calculate_word_method":"str_word_count","show_zoom_button":"0","zoom_button_out_step":"2","zoom_button_in_step":"3","show_post_tag":"1","show_comment_section":"1","number_popup_post":"1","show_post_related":"1","show_inline_post_related":"1"}],"image_override":[{"single_post_thumbnail_size":"crop-500","single_post_gallery_size":"crop-500"}],"trending_post_position":"meta","trending_post_label":"Trending","sponsored_post_label":"Sponsored by","disable_ad":"0","source_name":"Reuters","subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":{"view_counter_number":"0","share_counter_number":"0","like_counter_number":"0","dislike_counter_number":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[2362,3028,30],"tags":[3486,122],"class_list":["post-21742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-mining","category-southern-africa","tag-north-west-province","tag-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21742"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21743,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21742\/revisions\/21743"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}