Fourteen illegal miners were killed and eight seriously injured after a rockfall in a disused mine in Nkaneng near Rustenburg on Tuesday. Provincial Police Spokesperson Colonel Adele Myburgh said the miners were killed while they were working. She says officials were still on their way to the site; therefore, the nationalities of the deceased are not yet known. Thousands of unregistered miners known as "zama zamas" operate in South Africa, scavenging abandoned mines for gold and other minerals in arduous and often perilous conditions. "They go into discarded mine shafts ... it's so dilapidated, there's no infrastructure, there's no safety measures in place," she said.