Gold Mine Collapse Kills More Than 100 in Central African Republic, Separate Coltan Mine Collapse in Congo Killed Dozens More

More than 100 people are dead after an artisanal gold mine collapsed Tuesday in the village of Zamboye, in the Nana-Mambere prefecture of Central African Republic, near the border with Cameroon, according to the Associated Press.

Gervais Ganagoroh, a Red Cross volunteer working the relief effort, said more than 100 bodies have been recovered so far. Several survivors are critically injured. Bertrand Be Yangué, a member of the Zamboye youth council, said the toll will likely climb because people are still missing and others remain trapped under rubble.

"Finding them alive would be a miracle," Yangué told the AP. "We are saddened and heartbroken to see young men and women perish after coming to the mines to save their families from despair."

Al Jazeera reported that a local mining association official put the toll at more than 100 as of Wednesday, a figure AFP said several local sources confirmed. Souleymane Bi, the deputy mayor of Nana-Mambere prefecture, said rescuers and residents pulled 30 bodies from the site over several hours before the count kept rising. The Baboua public prosecutor's office said the collapse of several underground tunnels caused the disaster and announced a judicial inquiry to determine liability.

Cedric Mbango, a miner at the site, described it to AFP in blunt terms. "The ground completely collapsed and buried people. As I speak to you, other people are still buried. Rescue attempts are under way," he said.

Government spokesman Evariste Ngamana said authorities are "working hard to provide relief and assistance" to families of the victims. On the Cameroon side of the border, regional governor Gregoire Mvongo said his government is coordinating with Central African officials on the response.

A second, larger mine disaster in Congo

Days before the Zamboye collapse, a separate and even deadlier mine disaster struck eastern Congo. A coltan mine at the Rubaya site, controlled by the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group, collapsed, and Congo's Ministry of Mines said the death toll reached at least 200, according to the Associated Press.

That number is disputed by the rebels who actually run the site. Fanny Kaj, a senior M23 official, told the AP the collapse wasn't a landslide at all. "There was no landslide; there were bombings, and the death toll isn't what people are saying. It's simply about five people who died," Kaj said.

That account clashes directly with what a miner on the ground described. Ibrahim Taluseke told the AP he personally helped recover more than 200 bodies from the site. "The owners of the pits do not accept that the exact number of deaths be revealed," he said.

There's no way to independently verify either number right now. Rubaya sits in territory M23 has controlled since seizing it in May 2024, and the rebel group has been taxing coltan trade and transport out of the mines, generating at least $800,000 a month, according to a United Nations report cited by the AP. A group profiting off a mine's output has an obvious incentive to downplay a mass casualty event at that same mine.

Congo produced roughly 40% of the world's coltan in 2023, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and Rubaya alone accounts for more than 15% of global tantalum supply, the metal used in smartphones, computers and aircraft engines. That's why control of this dirt matters to more than the people digging it.

Two disasters, one pattern

Both collapses share the same root problem: thousands of people digging by hand, with no engineering standards, no government oversight, and no safety equipment, chasing minerals the rest of the world depends on.

Artisanal mine collapses are described as common in Central African Republic by multiple outlets covering the Zamboye disaster, including the AP and Al Jazeera, which noted a South Africa mine collapse killed 14 suspected illegal miners and a Nigeria mine carbon monoxide poisoning killed at least 37 in recent incidents. A bridge collapse at a copper and cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo killed dozens more, according to Al Jazeera's own reporting archive.

None of the coverage reviewed here offers a count of how many miners were working underground at Zamboye when the tunnels gave way, which makes the final death toll and any true sense of how close this came to being even worse impossible to pin down yet.

A judicial inquiry is underway in Baboua to determine what caused the Zamboye collapse and whether anyone running the site bears criminal responsibility, according to the prosecutor's statement reported by the AP. In Congo, no comparable investigation into the Rubaya collapse has been announced, and with M23 controlling both the mine and the flow of information out of it, verifying the actual death toll there may prove far harder than counting bodies in Zamboye.