Sudan Gold Mine Collapse Kills at Least 60

A shaft failure at the Al-Zaraa gold mine near El-Nahud in West Kordofan killed at least 60 small-scale miners on Tuesday.

Emergency teams and local workers retrieved 60 bodies by Wednesday morning, but dozens more remain trapped under the collapse.

Miners spent the night digging through rubble with basic tools as hopes of finding further survivors waned.

The catastrophic collapse spread rapidly across the site due to the density of the underground workings.

“The shafts here are all close together; if one collapses, it brings down all the ones next to it,” survivor Al-Amin Suleiman told AFP, adding that he doubts anyone trapped overnight survived.

Rescuers emphasised that manual digging is insufficient to clear the massive debris, with survivor Khair al-Sayyed Jabara stating, “Everyone’s working very hard to retrieve the bodies or any survivors, but it’s difficult. We need heavy machinery to clear the rock and soil.”

The disaster highlights the growing reliance on informal mining in war-torn Sudan, where ongoing conflict between the army and the Rapid Support Forces has shattered the economy and forced millions into high-risk gold production.

Artisanal operations now generate the bulk of the country’s gold output, driving workers into unsafe sites amid severe national hunger and displacement crises.