By Maxwell Akalaare Adombila and Christian Akorlie
ACCRA (Reuters) -A Ghanaian small-scale miners’ association on Sunday said soldiers killed nine unarmed people at an AngloGold Ashanti mine on Saturday night, while the army said seven illegal miners had been killed in a firefight.
Kofi Adams, local chairman of the Ghana National Association of Small Scale Miners, told Reuters that nine people had been killed and fourteen severely injured in the incident at the Obuasi gold mining site in the West African country’s Ashanti Region.
He said the people had not been armed.
Earlier, Ghana’s armed forces said that about 60 illegal miners carrying locally manufactured rifles and other weapons breached the mine’s security fence at around 11:00 pm (2300 GMT) on Saturday and fired on a military patrol deployed there, leading to a shootout.
“This is unprecedented (and) it’s difficult to understand why this happened,” Adams said, noting that in the past, trespassers on the site had been scared off with warning shots.
Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama ordered an immediate investigation into the incident, the presidency said in a statement on Sunday, calling it “tragic”.
The government has asked AngloGold Ashanti to cover the medical expenses of the injured and the cost of burials, the presidency’s statement said.
AngloGold Ashanti could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Johannesburg-listed miner owns the Iduapriem and Obuasi mines in southern Ghana. The two mines produced more than 490,000 ounces of gold last year.
(Writing by Portia Crowe in Dakar;Editing by Gareth Jones and Nia Williams)
