At least 32 people have been killed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to officials, after a bridge at a copper and cobalt mine collapsed due to overcrowding.
The incident occurred at the Kalando mine in southeastern Lualaba province on Saturday, the province’s interior minister, Roy Kaumbe Mayonde, said on Sunday.
“Despite a formal ban on access to the site because of the heavy rain and the risk of a landslide, wildcat miners forced their way into the quarry,” said Mayonde.
The miners rushing across the makeshift bridge, built to get across a flooded trench, made it collapse, he added.
A report by the DRC’s Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Support and Guidance Service, or SAEMAPE, said the gunfire from soldiers at the site had sparked panic among the miners.
The miners then rushed to the bridge, resulting in the fall that left them “piled on top of each other, causing the deaths and injuries”, it said.
While Mayonde put the death toll at least 32, the report said at least 40 people had lost their lives.
The report said the mine had been at the heart of a longstanding dispute between the wildcat miners, a cooperative that was meant to organise digging there, and the site’s legal operators, who were said to have Chinese involvement.
Arthur Kabulo, the provincial coordinator for the National Human Rights Commission, told the AFP news agency that more than 10,000 wildcat miners operated at Kalando.
Provincial authorities suspended operations at the site on Sunday.
The Initiative for the Protection of Human Rights, meanwhile, called for an independent investigation into the military’s role in the deaths, citing reports of clashes between miners and soldiers.
There was no immediate comment from the military.
The DRC is the world’s largest producer of cobalt, a mineral used to make lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and other products, with Chinese companies controlling 80 percent of the production in the central African country.
Accusations of child labour, unsafe conditions, and corruption have long plagued the country’s cobalt mining industry.
The DRC’s mineral wealth has also been at the heart of a conflict that has ravaged the country’s east for more than three decades.
