Rescuers are searching for survivors after a bridge collapsed at a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, killing at least 32 people.<\/p>\n
Unauthorised miners forced their way into the southern Kalando mine on Saturday despite being banned from the site, said local official Roy Kaumba Mayonde.<\/p>\n
Military personnel guarding the site then reportedly fired guns, causing the bridge to collapse after panicked miners rushed across it, government mining agency SAEMAPE said.<\/p>\n
The military has not responded to this allegation.<\/p>\n
Such accidents are not uncommon in DR Congo, where around 1.5 to 2 million people work in the unregulated artisanal mining industry, which feeds the global demand for copper, cobalt and other minerals.<\/p>\n
Two of the miners injured at Kalando mine, located in the village of Mulondo, sustained bullet wounds, Olivier Kayumba, a journalist who visited the scene on Sunday, said.<\/p>\n
Mr Kayumba told the BBC that one miner had been shot in the thigh and the other in the hand.<\/p>\n
In his statement, Mayonde said no miners had died from gunshot wounds. However, he did not say whether bullets had caused any non-fatal injuries.<\/p>\n
Mayonde called the collapse at the mine “tragic”, adding that mining companies in DR Congo were “frequently victims of this type of invasion of their concessions by illegal miners”.<\/p>\n
The miners had erected the bridge themselves, and the unstable structure was unable to sustain a large number of people making a “hasty” crossing, Mayonde said.<\/p>\n
Images circulating on social media, which have not been verified by the BBC, appear to show the lifeless remains of the miners as locals look on in disbelief.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Congolese authorities urged artisanal miners to take up the government’s offer of alternative training in agribusiness, in an attempt to avoid the recurrence of such tragedies.<\/p>\n
DR Congo is the world’s largest supplier of cobalt, which has defence and aerospace applications as well as being essential for batteries in electric vehicles.<\/p>\n
The process of extracting cobalt in DR Congo has been beset with concerns of child labour, human rights abuses and corruption.<\/p>\n
Additional reporting by Emery Makumeno in Kinshasa<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rescuers are searching for survivors after a bridge collapsed at a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":385659,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[50,103],"class_list":{"0":"post-385658","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115566182763750590","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}