At least nine trapped after gold mine landslide in country's east

ERZİNCAN

Thousands of rescuers have pressed ahead with efforts to search for at least nine workers trapped at a gold mine in eastern Türkiye that was engulfed by a massive landslide.

The landslide struck the Çöpler mine in the town of İliç in the country’s mountainous Erzincan province on Feb. 13. Footage seemingly shot by a worker showed a huge mass of earth rushing down a gully, overrunning everything in its path. The landslide involved a mound of soil extracted from the mine, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said.

Some 1,700 search and rescue personnel, including police and military teams, mine rescuers and volunteers, were deployed to find the mine workers, Yerlikaya said early on Feb. 14.

“All assessments indicate that five of the nine people searched for were in a container, three were in a vehicle and the other person, a driver, was in a truck in a different area,” he said.

Yerlikaya emphasized that the detection of workers inside vehicles and containers can be done with metal radar and that this is an advantage for search and rescue work.

Other workers at the mine have also joined the efforts to rescue their colleagues, while families of the missing waited at an area close to the mine for news of their loved ones, local media reported.

The Environment Ministry said in a statement that a stream leading to the nearby Euphrates River was closed to prevent water pollution.

Erzincan Governor Hamza Aydoğdu also expressed there was no leakage into the waterway.

The Justice Ministry, for its part, assigned four public prosecutors to investigate the mine’s operations.

In the investigation into the disaster, four people were detained. According to the local media, one of the detainees was the field supervisor.

The mine was closed down in 2020 following a cyanide leak into the river, which stretches through Türkiye, Syria and Iraq. It reopened two years later after the company was fined and a cleanup operation was completed.

The country’s worst mining disaster took place in 2014 at a coal mine in Soma, in western Türkiye, where 301 people were killed.

In the wake of those incidents, engineers warned that safety risks were frequently ignored, and inspections not adequately carried out.

Anagold, the private company that runs the İliç mine, said it was working to minimize the effects of this “painful” incident.

“We will mobilize all our means in order to urgently shed light on this incident,” Anagold said in a statement.