South Africa police launch manhunt for illegal mining ‘kingpin’

South Africa’s police have launched a manhunt for an alleged “kingpin”, who is accused of controlling operations at an abandoned gold mine where 78 corpses were discovered last week.

The police force said officials had helped James Neo Tshoaeli, a Lesotho national also known as Tiger, to escape after he was pulled up from the mine in Stilfontein.

More than 240 illegal miners were brought up alive from the mine after it had been blockaded for months by the police.

Officers had cut off food and water supplies in an attempt to force them out of the mine.

Some of the miners accused Mr Tshoaeli of being responsible for “deaths, assault and torture” underground, a police statement said on Monday.

Mr Tshoaeli is also alleged to have hoarded and kept food away from the other miners, many of whom appeared emaciated and weak when they surfaced from the shaft.

Police commissioner Patrick Asaneng warned that “heads will roll” once they find the officials who helped Mr Tshoaeli escape, the police statement said.

In a candid appearance on South African channel Newzroom Afrika, police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe said the force was “disappointed” and “embarrassed”.

Ms Mathe said an investigation into the escape has been launched and that the probe would start with the police “looking internally”.

After months when access to the mine shaft in Stilfontein was blocked, a court ordered the government to facilitate last week’s rescue operation.

On Thursday, as the rescue came to an end, Ms Mathe said it would be a “mammoth task” to identify the 78 bodies that were recovered – partly because many of them were undocumented migrants.

The miners had been underground since November last year, when police launched nationwide operations targeting illicit mining.

Thousands of illegal miners, known as “zama zamas” (“those who try their luck” in Zulu), operate in mineral-rich South Africa.

The mine in Stilfontein – some 145km (90 miles) south-west of Johannesburg – has now been cleared of both bodies and people alive, the police have said.

A trade union and rights activists have accused the authorities of overseeing a “massacre”.

But the police have defended their actions, saying that they were dealing with criminality and it was the kingpins in charge of the illicit mining who were controlling the flow of supplies and trying to prevent people from resurfacing.

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