'The soil was loose and dangerous': a warned-off scramble for copper stones kills three illegal miners at KCM's OB-19 dump

Three illegal miners, two of them teenagers, died after loose soil collapsed on them at Konkola Copper Mines' Over Burden 19 dumpsite along the Chingola-Solwezi Road on Wednesday evening — a death foretold, police say, by a warning the men heard and could not heed.

Copperbelt police commanding officer Rae Hamoonga said the incident happened around 18:20 hours and was reported at Chingola Central Police Station about an hour later. Preliminary information, he said, indicates that after workers from the company operating the dumpsite had knocked off for the day, a group of illegal miners entered the area to scavenge for stones suspected to contain copper ore.

An excavator operator had earlier warned the miners that the soil on the side of the hill was loose and dangerous. Shortly after the operator moved away, Hamoonga said, the miners scrambled to collect the stones — and a section of the hill came down on them. Several escaped before the collapse; others were trapped.

Fellow miners pulled five people out and rushed them to Nchanga North General Hospital, where Benjamin Kampelo, 17, and Kachama Kambongo, 18, were pronounced dead on arrival. The three other rescued miners were treated and discharged. During a subsequent search operation, the remains of a third victim, Misheck Mwanza, 20, were retrieved from beneath the collapsed soil and taken to the hospital mortuary.

Police have recorded a case of sudden and unnatural death, opened an inquiry file, and returned to the scene on Thursday to establish whether anyone else remains beneath the material. Hamoonga's caution was pointed: active mining and dumpsite areas "may contain unstable slopes and loose material capable of collapsing without warning, thereby putting lives at serious risk".

It is the Copperbelt's oldest trade and its deadliest. Chingola's dumps and open pits have drawn informal miners for decades, and the toll is recurrent: in December 2023, landslides at the Seseli open pit buried tunnellers, killing seven and leaving more than twenty missing and presumed dead. Each tragedy restarts the same argument — whether to formalise and police artisanal mining, or merely to fence it.

Sources: Mwebantu, "3 illegal miners die in KCM dumpsite collapse in Chingola, police say" (24 Sep 2026); Zambia Monitor (24 Sep 2026); News Diggers (24 Sep 2026); Associated Press on the Seseli landslides (Dec 2023, context).