All bodies recovered in landslide-hit Erzincan mine

ERZİNCAN

Search and rescue teams have wrapped up their operations at a landslide-hit gold mine in the eastern province of Erzincan as they recovered the body of the last worker trapped underground.

In a written statement issued on June 10, the Erzincan Governor’s Office confirmed that authorities reached the bodies of all nine workers nearly four months after the disaster that occurred on Feb. 13 at the gold mine site in the İliç district as a mass of soil with a volume of 10 million cubic meters shifted in the incident.

Teams first recovered the body of Uğur Yıldız on April 5, and the last five workers were located over the past month.

Due to the unrecognizable condition of the exhumed bodies, DNA samples from the families were compared at the Diyarbakır Forensic Medicine Institution.

A mass funeral ceremony will be held for the workers, with Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar expected to attend, local media reported.

A parliamentary commission had been established to investigate the incident and implement preventive measures for similar accidents in the future.

The media widely covered a series of negligence that led to the deadly disaster at the mine operated by U.S.-based SSR Mining and producing gold since December 2010 through Anagold Mining. The soil that slid during the disaster was a cyanide-containing waste generated in the process of extracting gold, adding that the primary cause of the accident was the excessive accumulation of material in the waste storage area and delayed precautions against cracks formed due to capacity overflow in the area.

In the investigation launched in connection with the disaster, the court arrested six individuals, including a Canadian representative of the company.