An air strike on a gold mine near Sudan’s disputed border with Egypt killed at least 72 miners on Saturday, a Sudanese rights group said, and it blamed the Egyptian military for the attack.
The group, Emergency Lawyers, documents abuses in Sudan’s war. In a post on X on Sunday, it said that “Egyptian fighter jets targeted civilian miners in the northern Wadi area inside Sudanese territory,” Al Jazeera reported. The strike hit Jabal al-Uqaydat, a mountainous mining area that straddles the frontier. The group called its toll preliminary and said work to document and verify the dead was still going on.
Egypt has made no official comment. Al Jazeera and Agence France-Presse both said they could not independently verify the account.
Abdelaziz Youssef, a miner, told AFP that a jet appeared overhead at about 8 a.m. on Saturday and “struck five times, many people were killed.” He said, “We ran up the mountain terrified of another strike.”
Another survivor, Sharaf Ali, said some of the miners fled to Al-Ansary, a gold market just south of the Halayeb Triangle. “After the airstrike people scattered, some people came to Al-Ansary market,” he said. “That’s why no one knows how many exactly were killed.”
Images shared on social media and by local rights groups showed dozens of bodies lying in rubble and others wrapped in funeral shrouds. They could not be verified.
It was the second deadly attack on the site this year. In June, strikes reportedly carried out by Egypt killed 23 workers there. Egypt’s army didn’t take responsibility for those strikes. It did describe a “large-scale operation” against illegal mining that it said took place “within Egyptian territory,” and it said 223 people had been detained, 136 of them foreign nationals. It also announced a campaign against “illegal gold mining and arms smuggling.”
Emergency Lawyers said the repeated strikes reflected a desire by Egyptian authorities “to expand and assert control over Sudan’s natural resources.”
Sudan and Egypt both claim the Halayeb Triangle, which is rich in resources. The mineral belt around it runs for hundreds of kilometers through the mountains along the border.
Cairo backs Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s army chief, in his war against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. That war began in April 2023 and has killed more than 200,000 people. It has also driven many Sudanese into informal gold mining, which is dangerous work, and gold money pays for the fighting on both sides.
Egypt still treats the war on its 1,200-kilometer (745-mile) southern border, which runs from the Red Sea to Libya, as a serious security threat. The stretch east of the Nile is porous and has long been a route for gold, smuggled goods and human trafficking. Egypt has tried to shut that traffic down, in part through mass deportations.