It’s the same heartbreaking story again in the Central African Republic. A desperate scramble for gold, a rain-soaked pit gives way, and dozens of families are left digging with their bare hands.

Tragedy has struck again in the west of the Central African Republic, and this time it’s at the sprawling Zamboye artisanal gold mine — locally known as Moscow-RCA.

According to cbiNews.tv, authorities have now temporarily shut the site after a massive landslide buried miners on Tuesday. Mines Minister Rufin Benam-Beltoungou, who visited the site on Wednesday, put the official death toll at 49 — including 34 Central Africans, 13 Cameroonians and two Chadians. Seven injured miners were rushed to hospital in Baboua, about 50km away.

But on the ground, locals are saying the real number is far higher. Red Cross volunteers and families at the scene told cbiNews.tv and other outlets that more than 100 bodies have already been recovered, with many more still trapped beneath tonnes of mud and rock.

One of those waiting was Roger Bana Nzala, who travelled overnight from Bouar after hearing his brother was in danger.

“We weren’t able to find our brother; he is still in the ground, he is buried in the ground,” he said. “In the end, we are forced to return empty-handed.”

The family had hoped to bring him home to Bouar for burial.

As of Thursday, access to the pit beside the Kadei River, right on the border with Cameroon, has been sealed off. Officials said rescue operations had to be suspended — the walls are still collapsing, and heavy seasonal rains have flooded the lower sections, making any recovery effort far too dangerous. Security has been beefed up in the area, with personnel from Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group deployed.

Why does this keep happening?

If you follow mining in CAR, this will sound painfully familiar. The country is rich in gold and diamonds, but most of it is dug up by hand in informal, almost entirely unregulated pits.

Artisanal mining is a lifeline for thousands of families, but it comes with almost zero safety measures, no proper shoring, and no emergency equipment when things go wrong.

And things go wrong constantly.

Civil society activist Crescent Beninga told cbiNews.tv: “This is not the first time we’ve seen a mine collapse.” He’s right.

* Just last month, on 9th June, at least eight miners were killed in a landslide at the Konyeme site in the same Nana-Mambere prefecture.

* Weeks before that, on 6th May, 23 miners died when a shaft collapsed at Be-Mbari — the same site Beninga flagged that had killed “several dozen” in a separate incident in June.

* Back in 2013, 37 people died at Ndassima, 440km east of Bangui, after heavy rains collapsed a pit that had already been shut by its Canadian owner, Axmin, in 2012 over security concerns. Thousands continued to work it illegally.

One local MP put it bluntly this week: “Hardly a month goes by without us being alerted to a collapse at a mining site.”

For context, CAR is one of the world’s poorest countries yet sits on an estimated $2 billion worth of untapped mineral reserves. With formal jobs scarce and large parts of the country outside state control since the 2013 civil war, artisanal mining has exploded. The government gets very little tax from it, and oversight is minimal — which is why sites like Zamboye can grow into massive open pits without a single safety inspector in sight.

Now, once again, the Mines Ministry says the disaster “highlights the dangers of artisanal operations”, and the site will remain closed until further notice. But for families in Bouar and Baboua, that’s cold comfort. They’re still waiting for answers, and for bodies to bury.

We’ll keep you updated on cbiNews.tv as more details come in from Zamboye.

Story via cbiNews.tv — Central Africa’s trusted independent news source. Reporting from Baboua / Bouar, CAR.

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