Police and other authorities unsuccessfully tried to extract the miners from the pits, which had collapsed and flooded with water from the overflowing Rugogo river.
Crack down begins against some 20,000 miners who Indigenous leaders say have set up illegal operations, raping and killing inhabitants, poisoning their water with mercury and ravaging forest they depend on for food.
Operation against more than 20,000 wildcat miners is imminent, officials say, as anger mounts over humanitarian crisis in isolated Yanomami villages on the country's largest Indigenous reservation.
Authorities in Roraima state say 59 Indigenous children are currently being treated, 45 of them from Yanomami tribes, who are being decimated by disease and illegal mining in Amazon jungle.
Indigenous Health Secretary Weibe Tapeba calls on military to act swiftly against illegal miners, saying 700 members of Indigenous community were going hungry due to invasion by 20,000 wildcat gold miners.
At least 14 people killed in armed dispute over areas where small-scale miners extract gold in Caraveli province of southern Arequipa region, officials say.
Around 100 people were killed after violence broke out at an informal gold mining site in the mountainous Kouri Bougoudi district, near the border with Libya.
Illegal gold miners in Battlefields, 175 kilometres west of Harare, entered shafts on land owned by RioZim and another firm on Tuesday night in search of gold, but a dam wall nearby collapsed, flooding the shafts and tunnels, local media report.
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