A landslide at an informal gold mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo where thousands of people were working has left an unknown number of people trapped underground since Sunday.
An official with the armed group that controls the area in eastern Congo where the mining accident occurred confirmed the landslide in a phone call on Tuesday. The official, Élie Rubabura, said that a team was searching for people in 14 shafts at the site in Lomera.
While thousands of miners have been digging in Lomera in recent months, the number of miners who were in the shafts on Sunday is not known. Twelve people have been rescued, Mr. Rubabura said, adding that the number of missing would be released only once the search was over.
The Lomera site is an artisanal mine, meaning it is not operated by a mining company with professional equipment but by workers who use basic tools to extract ore, often in dangerous conditions.
Official information on any casualties and exactly how many people are missing has been difficult to confirm. Lomera is in territory controlled by M23, a militia backed by neighboring Rwanda. After the landslide, M23 shut down all mining and trading in Lomera until further notice, prompting many people to leave the village.
On Tuesday, M23 members walked around the site issuing instructions to those who remained, telling them not to film or speak to journalists. There was no sign that a serious search for survivors was underway, according to a local journalist, who insisted on anonymity out of fear of his safety.
A Congolese government agency responsible for assisting and supervising artisanal miners, SAEMAPE, normally has representatives at mining sites like Lomera, collecting and disseminating information on events like landslides and floods, which are common in Congo. But SAEMAPE officials were forced to leave when M23 seized control of the mine and its surrounding area this year, and did not respond to calls.
Before December, Lomera was a small, sleepy lakeside village in South Kivu and home to about 1,500 people. Then, gold was discovered, and thousands of prospectors flocked to the village seeking their fortune, rapidly turning it into a mess of mine shafts, heaps of earth and flimsy tarpaulin shelters.
Doctors Without Borders said the population ballooned to about 12,000 people, who live in extremely crowded and insanitary conditions — perfect for a severe cholera outbreak, which soon followed.
According to a youth worker in the nearby city of Bukavu, hundreds of children were among those working at the site.
A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, which has been working to fight the cholera outbreak in Lomera, said that he did not know how many people were injured in the landslide, since local officials had taken the wounded to the nearby town of Bukavu.
The number of people risking their lives to make a living digging for minerals is growing globally. About 45 million people work directly in artisanal and small-scale mining worldwide, according to the World Bank, and 180 million do so indirectly. It is a growing sector, driven by high demand for minerals: In the 1990s, artisanal and small-scale mining represented about 4 percent of the world’s supply of gold. That has since increased to 20 percent.
Congo’s formal mining sector earns the government export revenue and contributes to its gross domestic product. But artisanal mining provides far more employment, albeit informal and often dangerous work.
This year, Rwanda seized large amounts of Congolese land rich in minerals. In a yet-to-be-released report seen by The New York Times, United Nations experts recently wrote that M23 and its political arm, Alliance Fleuve Congo, had “secured Rwanda’s access to mineral-rich territories and fertile land.”
A trader who worked in Lomera, Dieubi Bisimwa, said that most people at the mine thought that those who had not yet escaped would have died underground by now, and that it would not be possible to recover their bodies.
“The families are mourning their missing loved ones,” the trader said.
Mr. Bisimwa said that other traders and miners thought the site should be treated as a tomb, and a memorial service should be held to commemorate the dead.
And then, he said, they could move on and get back to work.
“Nothing concrete has been done for three days now since the incident,” Mr. Bisimwa said. “We hope things will return to normal.”