Mudslide kills three gold miners in Afghanistan

Faizabad: Three workers at a gold mine in northern Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province lost their lives due to a mudslide, Provincial Director for Information and Culture Hekmatullah Mohammadi said on Friday.

The miners were busy extracting gold from a gold mine in Khwahan district on Thursday afternoon when a hilltop slipped suddenly, killing the three on the spot, the official added without providing more details, Xinhua news agency reported.

A similar incident killed two miners in Badakhshan’s neighbouring Takhar province a couple of months ago.

Lack of safety measures, unskilled miners, absence of necessary pieces of machinery, and extracting mines by traditional and old-fashioned methods often lead to the death of mine workers in poverty-stricken Afghanistan, according to locals.