CAGAYAN DE ORO, Philippines – A raid by the police on an illegal mining site led to the arrest of 10 illegal miners extracting gold in a new gold rush area in a remote village in Opol town, Misamis Oriental, on Friday, October 18.
Opol town police investigator Rodel Suaybaguio said the police also confiscated two dump trucks, eight motorcycles, and 300 sacks of gold ore worth P6.7 million.
Suaybaguio said the raid was conducted by a joint team of policemen from Opol and Manticao towns, acting on information from villagers.
He said the new gold rush area is located in Barangay Limonda, a remote village in Opol, reachable only through a rough road in another town, Manticao.
“We left Opol around 1 am Friday and went to Manticao. We reached Barangay Limonda around 4 am after three hours of rough riding,” Suaybaguio said.
He said they caught the illegal miners in the act of transporting sacks of ore for delivery to clandestine ball mill machines operating in Manticao town.
The miners used motorcycles to transport the sacks of gold ore to waiting dump trucks, he added.
A villager, who asked not to be identified, said Barangay Limonda is the new gold rush area where farmers leave their farms to join miners extracting ore from the Iponan River.
“Even children are now being used by their parents to mine for gold. Many children have stopped going to school to join their parents,” the villager said.
In 2013, a Writ of Kalikasan was issued by the Court of Appeals (CA)to protect the Iponan River and mandated various government agencies to help protect the fragile ecosystem. – Rappler.com