Collected photoKHARTOUM, Jan 28, 2026 (BSS/AFP) - A partial collapse of a gold mine haskilled 13 miners and wounded six others in southern Sudan, the state miningcompany said on Wednesday. The collapse occurred in "five abandoned shafts" of the Umm Fakroun mine inSouth Kordofan state last Friday, the Sudanese Mineral Resources Company(SMRC) said in a statement. But officials lament that much of the gold is smuggled across bordersincluding through Chad, South Sudan and Egypt before reaching the United ArabEmirates, the world's second-largest gold exporter. Africa's third-largest country is one of the continent's top gold producers,but artisanal and small-scale gold mining, like Umm Fakroun, accounts for themajority of gold extracted. Before the war pushed 25 million Sudanese into acute food insecurity,artisanal mining employed more than two million people, according to industryfigures.

Source: Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha January 28, 2026 13:36 UTC