In a dangerous cat-and-mouse game, South African police are battling armed gangs of gold pirates through dark mine shafts deep underground to stop an illicit gold trade worth more than $700-million (about R5,1-billion) a year.
Assistant Police Commissioner Mike Fryer said the new operation — pitting police against pirate miners in shafts as deep as 2km below the surface — opened a fresh front in South Africa’s war against gold smuggling.
”Our biggest problem is that they were utilising explosives and hand-made grenades to threaten the people underground,” Fryer said. ”If one of those goes off in the wrong place, the whole thing could come tumbling down.”
Police have arrested a total of 60 illegal miners in six operations in recent months, often following hair-raising encounters with rogue gold pirates who ”hijack” mine shafts.
A series of photographs in Johannesburg’s Star newspaper, which broke the story on Wednesday, showed dust-covered illegal miners and one of their hand-made grenades.
Police explosives expert Joe Meiring, who took part in the operation, said pirates assemble the bombs by sticking explosives in a bottle or a beer can and use iron for shrapnel.
”It can have a trip wire, or they’ll just light it and throw it at you,” he added.
Miners sometimes spent as much as a year in nightmarish underground tunnels without coming back to the surface in order to maximise their takings, Meiring told Reuters.
”There is no fresh air, it can be as hot as 38 degrees Celsius, everything is very compressed and the humidity is extremely high. They work there, they sleep there, they eat there,” he said. ”It is hot and dark, and they age very quickly.”
Big business
Illegal mining is big business in South Africa, where the Institute of Security Studies estimated in 2001 that mining companies lost as much as 35,6 tonnes of gold per year to the pirates — equivalent to about a 10th of the country’s total gold production.
At current market prices that would be worth more than $700-million.
Fryer said the police began training their underground team after appeals from mine security personnel, who were running into armed panhandlers in dangerous, disused tunnels.
”They actually threw one of their hand-made grenades at security, but nobody was hurt. They were lucky because it was a relatively stable environment … further down the shaft it would have been horrific.”
Meiring said the illegal miners use basic tools such as chisels to prise out the valuable ore, which they then process using grinders and mercury, itself a dangerous process.
The illegal miners survive by buying surreptitious deliveries of food from regular miners at wildly inflated prices and sleep on wooden planks. Some even reportedly have girlfriends living with them deep in the shafts.
Meiring said that along with the danger of grenades and collapsing shafts, police worry the gangs are arming themselves to repel intruders — which could open a bloody new chapter in South Africa’s unfolding underground gold rush.
”About two months ago we caught one of them and he had a handgun, so they’ve definitely got those, and some security guys say they have seen them carrying AK-47s,” he said. — Reuters