In a telephone call from the area of the incident, "Khaled Dhoi, the director of the branch of the Sudanese Mineral Resources Company, the State monitoring agency for mining

activities, said, 31 traditional ers were killed and one survived, while eight were still missing." In the collapse of a mine in the Umm Darisah area near the town of Al-Nahud, Western Kordofan, about 500 kilometres west of the capital, Khartoum.

For more than a decade, traditional gold mining mines have spread to various regions of the Sudan, where people are helping workers dig land and break stones to extract gold ore.

The number of people working in these traditional mines is estimated by government agencies to be two million, producing about 80 percent of the country's production, which is about 80 tons a year.

A company official confirmed that the accident was not the first in this mine, where four people died last January.

"The authorities then closed the mine and placed a guard on it, but the guard was withdrawn two months ago," the official added.