South Africa’s elite police unit, the Hawks, is vowing to hunt down illegal mining kingpins.  This comes after two bodies were discovered inside an abandoned gold mine where dozens of alleged trespassers had been trapped and rescued earlier.

“One body was brought to the surface by the miners, we have been unable to get to the second body,” said Roggers Mamaila, part of the emergency team trying to coax remaining miners out of the shaft.  The other one was waiting to be recovered as of Tuesday.

Major General Shadrack Sibiya of the Hawks says 22 illegal miners were arrested – aged 13 to 40 years old, all foreign nationals attracted to the dangerous game of descending into a disused and played out gold mine in hopes of finding one of the few remaining nuggets.

“We appreciate the cooperation we have received from these illegal miners and we are convinced that information obtained will lead us to the king-pins behind these activities. We will be going after the masterminds. We cannot allow this to continue.”

Rescuers were called out to the mine near Benoni, just outside Johannesburg, over the weekend to rescue a dozen or so illegal miners trapped in the shaft.  It’s believed that a rival group dropped boulders down the shaft to trap them.