South Africa criticised as 78 corpses pulled from mine

At least 78 dead bodies have been pulled from an illegal gold mine in South Africa where police cut off food and water supplies for months, in what trade unions called a "horrific" crackdown on desperate people trying to eke out a living.

A total of 246 survivors, some of them emaciated and disorientated, have been brought to the surface and immediately arrested for illegal mining and immigration since a court-ordered rescue operation began on Monday.

Volunteers who went down to the mine, located 2km underground near Stilfontein, southwest of Johannesburg, told police late on Wednesday they could not see anyone left in the tunnels, a police spokesperson told reporters at the site.

Rescuers would keep working on Thursday to make sure all bodies and survivors had been recovered, the spokesperson said.

Earlier, there were fears dozens or even hundreds more men could still be trapped.

The South African Federation of Trade Unions accused the state on Tuesday of allowing the men "to starve to death in the depths of the earth".

"These miners, many of them undocumented and desperate workers from Mozambique and other southern African countries, were left to die in one of the most horrific displays of state wilful negligence in recent history," it said in a statement.

Mametlwe Sebei, a trade union leader who has been trying to help the miners, said police had begun attempting to force the miners up to the surface in August by removing a pulley system used to deliver food and water supplies to them.

Sebei said some miners had died crawling through flooded tunnels in an attempt to reach shafts that would have allowed them to climb out.

SAFTU statement on Stilfontein massacrehttps://t.co/Gql9z9qJbp? SAFTU (@SAFTU_media) January 15, 2025

Police said 1576 miners had got out by their own means between August and the start of the rescue operation.

All were arrested and 121 of them have already been deported, they said.

"We've never blocked any shafts. We've never blocked anyone from coming out," said Athlenda Mathe, spokeswoman for the South African police, speaking at the site on Wednesday.

"Our mandate was to combat criminality and that is exactly what we've been doing," she said.

"By providing food, water and necessities to these illegal miners it would be the police entertaining and allowing criminality to thrive."

The death toll makes the crackdown on the Stilfontein mine one of the deadliest on miners in recent South African history.

Illegal mining is common in parts of gold-rich South Africa.

Typically, undocumented miners known as zama zamas - from an isiZulu expression for "taking a chance" - move into mines abandoned by commercial miners and seek to extract whatever is left.

Some are under the control of violent criminal gangs.

Most of the miners at Stilfontein were from Mozambique although some also came from Zimbabwe and Lesotho.

Only 21 of them were South Africans, police said.

As the death toll has mounted, so has criticism of the authorities, although the government has defended the siege as part of a necessary crackdown on illegal mining.

"It's a criminal activity. It's an attack on our economy by foreign nationals in the main," Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe said at the site on Tuesday.

He has said illegal mining cost South Africa more than $US3 billion ($A4.8 billion) last year.

But the Democratic Alliance, the second-biggest party in the ruling coalition led by the African National Congress, said on Wednesday the crackdown at the mine had got "badly out of hand" and called for an independent inquiry.

A court ruled in December that volunteers should be allowed to send essential supplies down to the miners, and a separate ruling last week ordered the state to launch the rescue.

None of the rescued survivors were hospitalised and all were taken into police custody.

"If you come out and you are able to walk they take you straight to the cells," said Mzukisi Jam, a civil society activist, who has been at the site throughout the rescue operation.

Only two of the bodies have been identified and claimed by their families, Mathe said.

Rescue efforts were in their third day on Wednesday, with a red cylindrical metal cage being lowered into the mine to extract survivors and corpses.