Body of another worker recovered at landslide-hit Erzican mine

ERZİNCAN

Search teams have recovered the lifeless body of another miner more than two months after a landslide at a gold mine in the eastern province of Erzincan, with efforts ongoing for the other seven workers trapped underground.

Authorities on April 19 identified the worker whose body was retrieved from beneath the soil as Adnan Keklik, a married father of two.

Nine workers were buried under the soil in the landslide 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, after they found a white pickup truck at the site of the mine.

Meanwhile, a parliamentary commission has been established to investigate the incident and implement preventive measures for similar accidents in the future. The names of the members elected to the commission were published in the Official Gazette on April 19.

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.

Last week, daily Hürriyet reported that the gold mine disaster caught the attention of some law firms in the U.S. Legal advisors issued statements encouraging investors of the company, whose shares plummeted on the U.S. stock markets following the disaster and after the resignation of the finance director, to file lawsuits to compensate for their losses.

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