At least two were killed May 24 as security forces clashed with protesting gold miners at Burkina Faso's western Houndé commune, Tuy province. The protesters were demanding the release of 12 of their comrades who had been arrested a week earlier, when informal miners angered by government moves to expel their camps overran and ransacked the facilities of Houndé Gold Operation [14], a subsidiary of the UK-based multinational Endeavour Mining [15]. (AfricaNews [17], AFP [18]) Rescue workers meanwhile recovered the bodies of four miners who had gone missing after floodwaters submerged a zinc mine operated by Canada's Trevali Mining [19] at Perkoa, in nearby Sanguié province. (CNN [20], BBC News Gahuza [21])
In far greater violence, fighting between rival groups of informal gold miners in the remote north of Chad on May 23 left an estimated 200 dead. The clashes at Kouri Bougoudi, in the Tibesti mountains [22] on the Libyan border, apparently pitted ethnic Arabs against members of the Tama community. (AFP [23], Al Jazeera [24])
