JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) - London- and Johannesburg-listed gold junior Pan African on Thursday appealed to the South African government for assistance after another eight trespassing miners were found dead in the Consort underground gold mine in Barberton, taking the total number to 13 since the weekend.

Pan African CEO Jan Nelson told Mining Weekly Online that the only way to stop the ongoing illegal mining in the area was for the South African government to appoint a special task force to track down the ringleaders and to convict them.

Nelson said that the illegal mining activities were so well organised that some of the trespassers had been found with drilling equipment more sophisticated than Pan African's own drilling equipment.

The illegal network was also sufficiently organised to be able to provide sustenance to the illegal miners that enabled them to remain underground for months at a time.

Nelson said that attempts to keep the illegal miners out by systematically plugging the points of entry with steel-reinforced concrete caps had failed after trespassers succeeded in blasting their way through plugs.

The bodies of the first five dead illegal miners were taken out of the mine on Sunday after an underground fire, and the bodies of the other eight dead miners were discovered on Wednesday.

"We think that what happened in this case is that they probably cooked something underground and that lit the old timber, causing a fire to break out," Nelson said.

Although illegal mining had been taking place in the area for many years, it was intensifying with the surge in the gold price.

Because armed trespassers had shot at police the last time they ventured underground to apprehend them, police were no longer prepared to enter the mine and the company had, as a consequence, employed two security firms to tackle the problem.

"We've increased our security spending to £360 000 over the last six months," Nelson said.

Even though stricter sentences of close to a year's jail were being handed down, this was not proving a deterrent.

Certain suspected ringleaders had been tailed in order to gather intelligence, but Nelson did not hold out much hope of eradicating the problem without the assistance of a special government-sanctioned task force.

"We are not the only mine that has this problem and we would be willing to contribute money towards such a task force. We need to remove this risk.

"With gold going over $1 000/oz, the problem is just getting bigger. While it affects only 5% of our working areas, because they only operate in areas where they can extract the visible gold, it takes up a lot of our management's time. But we are also having to consider the safety of our own employees and the last thing we want underground is hostility between our employees and the trespassing miners," Nelson said.

The volume of gold removed by the illegal miners is unknown, but 3 kg of gold amalgam had been found on one group that had been apprehended.

"One needs to find out how big the network is, identify the heads of the network and then put an end to all this," Nelson said.

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