The Upper East Regional Minister has directed that a committee be set up to probe circumstances leading to the trapping and death of 9 illegal miners at an underground mine Gbane in the Talensi district.

According to Mr Stephen Yakubu, the committee's task is to ensure such happenings do no reoccur in the District.

“In order for this not to happen again, I am going to put up a Committee to look over small scale mining here in the region. We are talking about our region and particularly this area, what is it that we [should] learn and do so that these unfortunate happenings will never happen again? And so I am going to do that,” he said.

His comment comes at the back the trapping of some galamsey miners in an abandoned pit at Gbane.

The unfortunate incident occurred on the evening of Monday, May 31, after the pit they were working in was inundated by water following a heavy downpour.

Police in the Upper East region, has confirmed that nine (9) of the miners trapped in the pit at the Gbane mining site died in the incident. Their bodies were recovered after a 48-hour search during which the rescue team pumped water out of the underground mines in a desperate attempt to locate and save them.

However, Upper East Regional Minister Stephen Yakubu has assured that the rescue mission is still ongoing to locate any other miners who may still be trapped underground.

“The question I ask my self is, when it was raining, did we have a way of alerting these people down there to come up very quickly?

“That is what I really want the Committee to find out. If we did, probably the alarm would have been given to those people, ‘Please come out very quickly,’ and they would have done that,” he said.