The explosion of a stockpile of dynamite left at least 59 people dead and several injured on the afternoon of Monday February 21 at the Gomgombiro gold panning site market in the village of Gbomblora, in western Burkina Faso . A provisional report communicated by the official information agency and national television which quote a regional authority around 6:30 p.m. GMT.
“We do not know exactly the type of explosives, but the terrorist track is completely ruled out,” said the prosecutor. An investigation has also been opened to locate the exact causes of this explosion, and “several people have already been arrested”, it is specified.
Three days before the tragedy, two people were killed in a landslide at an artisanal gold site in the south of the country.
While the official gold sector has approximately 15,000 direct jobs and 50,000 indirect jobs, gold panning, an officially prohibited activity, employs more than a million people in Burkina Faso, generating an additional annual production of around 10 tonnes of gold, according to data from the Ministry of Mines.
