Sudan miners: group says Egypt strike killed 72

Sudanese rights group Emergency Lawyers said Sunday that Egyptian military aircraft killed 72 civilian miners in airstrikes on a gold mine on the Sudan-Egypt border a day earlier.

The group, which documents atrocities in Sudan, said the reported toll was based on preliminary information and that efforts to document and verify casualties were continuing. Its allegation against Egypt has not been independently confirmed in the supplied information.

Survivors told AFP that strikes hit the remote Jabal al-Uqaydat informal gold mining site near the Red Sea on Saturday morning. One survivor, Abdelaziz Youssef, said a jet appeared overhead at about 8:00 am local time and struck five times. He said many people were killed and survivors ran up a mountain fearing another strike.

Another survivor, Sharaf Ali, said thousands of people had been working at the site when it was hit. He said people fled in different directions, making the death toll unclear. Both survivors said they saw bodies on the ground as they escaped, with more people feared trapped under rubble.

The reported attack took place on the army-controlled side of Sudan. The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces are not known to have fighter jets in their arsenal.

Al-Ansary, a nearby gold market where some people fled, lies just south of the Halayeb triangle, a disputed border area claimed by both Sudan and Egypt. The wider mountainous region has major gold deposits.

The reported strike was the second attack on Jabal al-Uqaydat this year, after reports that Egyptian fighter jets killed 23 miners there in June. Egypt's army said at the time that it had carried out a “large-scale operation within Egyptian territory” and detained 223 people, including 136 foreign nationals, as part of a campaign against illegal gold mining and arms smuggling.

Sudan's war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces has killed more than 200,000 people since April 2023 and created a deep humanitarian crisis. The conflict has pushed many Sudanese into dangerous gold mining, an industry that fuels both sides' war efforts.