Rescue workers dig for miners after landslide

Rescue workers were battling to retrieve bodies yesterday after a landslide swept over an illegal, open-pit gold mine in central Colombia, killing at least 15 people and leaving up to 50 others missing.

The Red Cross said an 11-year-old boy was among the workers ­ mostly from poor families ­ killed in the accident, which took place at about 5am local time in the rural district of La Amapola, in the coffee-rich state of Caldas, 110 miles west of the capital Bogota.

A Civil Defence Agency spokeswoman, Natalia Gaviria, said: "We have 15 people confirmed dead. There could be up to 50 other people missing. Rescue efforts are going to be very difficult and could take days. It rained hard for days here and it is a swampy area down there."

The Governor of Caldas, Luis Alfonso Arias, did not know what had caused the accident but he said the mine did not have a mining licence and that the workers were working in poor safety conditions.

Television images showed rescue workers toiling under a blazing sun to pull bodies from the mud. Cranes dug deep into a boggy hillside to find more victims of the landslide as survivors and relatives waited for news of their missing loved ones.

Jesus Uria Romera told reporters: "I told my wife not to go to the mine because it is very dangerous but she didn't listen." One of the survivors, Danilo Bedoya, said no one had time to raise the alarm. "The mine came down on us and we had no time to do anything," he said.

This is not the first such accident to hit Colombia's illegal mines, many of which are little more than hand-dug burrows in the ground. Last April, seven miners were killed by a landslide in an open-pit gold mine in the west coast province of Choco. Also in April, a methane explosion killed all 15 men working in a coal mine in Norte de Santander in the north of the country.