Dozens of gold prospectors killed in strikes on Egypt-Sudan border, rights group says
I keep coming back to the word "artisanal" in this story. It sounds small and handmade, like a craft fair, but it means people with pickaxes and pans working a claim that a state or a corporation would never bother with. These are the miners who dig by hand because they have nothing else, and they're the ones who end up under the bombs. The fact that neither Egypt nor Sudan has commented tells me the strikes probably didn't happen by accident.
What I'd want to know is who was in that camp and what they were pulling out of the ground. Gold in this region has a way of turning borders into rumors. The desert there is so vast and so ungoverned that a strike on a mining camp could be a message, a land grab, or a settling of scores that has nothing to do with the miners themselves. They just happened to be standing on the wrong patch of dirt.
I don't have a confident read on this one. The absence of comment from both governments is the loudest detail, and it usually means the truth is inconvenient for everyone involved. I'd want to see satellite imagery of the site and hear from any survivors, but those voices rarely make it out of the desert.