
Subscribe & Follow
Advertise your job vacancies
At least seven killed at Ghana gold mine
A Ghanaian small-scale miners' association on Sunday said soldiers killed nine unarmed people at an AngloGold Ashanti mine on Saturday night, while the army said seven illegal miners had been killed in a firefight. Kofi Adams, local chairman of the Ghana National Association of Small Scale Miners, told Reuters that nine people had been killed and fourteen severely injured in the incident at the Obuasi gold mining site in the West African country's Ashanti Region. He said the people had not been armed.

AngloGold Ashanti's main sulphide treatment plant is seen in Obuasi. Source: Reuters/Kwasi Kpodo
Earlier, Ghana's armed forces said that about 60 illegal miners carrying locally manufactured rifles and other weapons breached the mine's security fence on Saturday and fired on a military patrol deployed there, leading to a shootout.
"This is unprecedented (and) it's difficult to understand why this happened," Adams said, noting that in the past, trespassers on the site had been scared off with warning shots.
Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama ordered an immediate investigation into the incident, the presidency said in a statement on Sunday, calling it "tragic".
Medical expenses
The government has asked AngloGold Ashanti to cover the medical expenses of the injured and the cost of burials, the presidency's statement said.
AngloGold Ashanti could not immediately be reached for comment.
The JSE-listed miner owns the Iduapriem and Obuasi mines in southern Ghana. The two mines produced more than 490,000oz of gold last year.
Source: Reuters

Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the world's largest multimedia news provider, reaching billions of people worldwide every day.
Go to: https://www.reuters.com/Related
Adopt-a-School Foundation celebrates its national matric top achiever at a rural Limpopo school 20 Jan 2025 Sixty bodies retrieved from Stilfontein 15 Jan 2025 Stilfontein: ‘It was not an illness that killed them. It was starvation’ 6 Jan 2025 ‘Gold rush’ driven by geopolitics and consumer anxiety 12 Dec 2024 Sibanye-Stillwater braces for challenging interim results 3 Sep 2024 Harmony rides high on soaring gold prices 26 Aug 2024
