Seven miners were confirmed dead and more than 20 others were missing and presumed dead after heavy rains caused landslides that buried them inside tunnels they had been digging illegally at a copper mine in Zambia, police and local authorities said Saturday.
No bodies had yet been retrieved after the landslides late on Thursday night, police said. Many of the victims were believed to have drowned.
The miners were digging for copper ore at the Seseli open-pit mine in the copper-belt city of Chingola, around 400 km (250 miles) north of the capital, Lusaka, according to police. The landslides happened some time between 9 pm and 10 pm on Thursday, police said.
Police gave names or partial names of seven confirmed victims and said all of the miners in the tunnels are suspected to have died.
Neither police nor government officials could say exactly how many miners were trapped in the tunnels, but Chingola District Commissioner Raphael Chumupi told The Associated Press that there were at
