Eight bodies of miners killed execution style were found over the weekend, two of them underground.<\/p>\n
Lt-Col Lungelo Dlamini could not say whether more bodies were thought to still be underground.<\/p>\n
According to a report in The Star murders took place at the Modder East mine, between the N12 and New Modder Road.<\/p>\n
All eight were shot in the upper body. The motive for the killing was unknown and the bodies had not been identified.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Dlamini said there were allegations that the men were foreigners.<\/p>\n
On Saturday morning security guards found several cartridges near the bodies.<\/p>\n
No arrests had been made.<\/p>\n
The bodies were discovered by mine security between Saturday and Sunday.<\/p>\n
“We don’t know the motive behind the killings,” said Dlamini.<\/p>\n
Local media is speculating that they could have been killed by a rival illegal mining gang.<\/p>\n
Fighting between competing gangs is commonplace among the illegal miners at South Africa’s abandoned gold mines, where unemployed and impoverished people extract any remaining gold with makeshift tools.<\/p>\n
Much of the area around Johannesburg is pockmarked with old shafts,and while\u00a0many are no longer commercially viable, they still contain enough deposits to attract scores of unemployed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Eight bodies of miners killed execution style were found over the weekend, two of them underground. Lt-Col Lungelo Dlamini could not say whether more bodies were thought to still be underground. According to a report in The Star murders took place at the Modder East mine, between the N12 and New Modder Road. All eight … Continue reading “Eight miners shot execution style”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[1871,9282,9281,1183],"class_list":["post-14422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-south-africa","tag-benoni","tag-gold-mines","tag-illegal-miners","tag-miners"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14423,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14422\/revisions\/14423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}