More than 100 miners are dead after underground tunnels collapsed at an unregulated gold mine near the Central African Republic's border with Cameroon, and rescuers say the body count keeps climbing.
Several tunnels at an artisanal mining site in Zamboye gave way roughly two days before recovery teams pulled more than ten additional bodies from the debris on Thursday morning alone. Local Red Cross volunteer Gervais Ganagoro told the Associated Press that hopes of finding anyone alive were fading fast.
A court in the Baboua subprefecture, the local administrative jurisdiction, confirmed that the tunnels caved in and triggered a landslide. It opened an investigation to determine why the tunnels failed, identify the dead, track down whoever was responsible for running the site, and establish whether criminal charges are warranted.
The disaster lays bare what happens when governments allow dangerous, unregulated extraction to flourish for decades without basic safety enforcement, and when armed groups operate freely in the same territory.
Ganagoro did not sugarcoat the situation on the ground. The Red Cross, he said, could not even estimate how many miners were still trapped beneath the earth.
"Every hour, bodies are being discovered, increasing the number of victims."
Local officials and the Red Cross confirmed the death toll had passed 100 by Wednesday. Among the dead: at least four Cameroonians and two Chadians, according to Abdon Adamou, the mayor of Garoua-Boulai, a Cameroonian town near the site. Adamou said he was coordinating with Central African authorities to bring injured Cameroonians home and return the bodies of those killed.
Jérémie Ngbiri, a miner who lost his brother and a friend in the collapse, said he watched victims suffocate during rescue attempts. His assessment of the operation was blunt.
"The rescue effort is being organized, but it is not up to the task."
That a disaster of this scale is being handled by volunteers and local officials with no apparent heavy equipment or professional mine-rescue capability tells you everything about the state of governance in the region.
One of the Cameroonian miners killed was 32-year-old Doudou Marcel, a father of two who had worked at the Zamboye site for about five years. Marcel had tried to enter the public service after leaving school but failed, and turned to mining instead. His body was buried Wednesday at the family compound in eastern Cameroon.
His uncle, 50-year-old Hamadou Abba, described the shock of learning what had happened.
"At first, I didn't believe he was dead, and had to call other contacts to confirm. His corpse and his friend's who also died in the incident were brought back the same day."
Marcel's story is not unusual. Thousands of people work in small-scale mining across the Central African Republic. The pits are frequently dug by hand and can reach several meters deep. Workers descend into unstabilized shafts with no safety gear, no engineering oversight, and no recourse when the ground gives way.
Chekoua Justin Landry, a program manager at Forests and Rural Development, a Cameroonian nonprofit focused on natural-resource governance, pointed to conditions that made a catastrophe like this almost inevitable.
"Safety conditions are not ensured at these sites. The walls of these pits are not stabilized, and with the rains, landslides can happen easily."
Landry said artisanal mining around Zamboye has been practiced for decades, handed down from generation to generation. But the introduction of mechanized equipment expanded gold extraction considerably, bringing what he called "major environmental damage as well as accidents in mining pits."
Mayor Adamou separately confirmed that heavy rainfall had weakened the soils in the area, a factor that likely contributed to the tunnel failures.
None of this was a secret. Earlier in 2026, researchers and local media had reported on unsafe and unregulated mining tied to a rapidly expanding gold rush around Zamboye. And in 2025, United Nations experts published a report documenting illicit mining in the same area, including the involvement of armed groups and the use of extraction methods that posed serious health and environmental risks.
Central African Republic Mines Minister Rufin Benam Beltoungou responded to the disaster with a statement expressing condolences to victims' families and warning miners about the dangers of unsafe practices. No direct quote from the minister appeared in available reporting, just the official statement.
The warning rings hollow. If the government knew enough to caution miners about unsafe conditions, it knew enough to enforce basic safety standards before more than 100 people were buried alive. A UN report documented the problem a full year earlier. Local media flagged the gold rush months before the collapse. Armed groups were operating in the mining area. And the official response, after the fact, amounted to a press release.
The Baboua court's investigation will supposedly determine who ran the site and whether criminal liability applies. But in a region where illicit mining has operated openly for decades, with armed groups involved and no meaningful regulatory presence, accountability has never been the government's strong suit.
Key questions remain unanswered. How many miners were at the site when the tunnels collapsed? How many are still unaccounted for? Have any survivors been confirmed? And which armed groups, exactly, were operating in the area according to the UN report? The Red Cross said it could not provide those numbers. No one else has stepped forward with them either.
More than 100 workers are dead, a grief-stricken uncle is burying his 32-year-old nephew, and a volunteer rescue operation is pulling bodies from the mud by the hour. The Central African Republic's government had the warnings, had the reports, and had the authority to act. It chose not to, and ordinary people paid the price with their lives.
