Three employees of Canadian miner B2Gold Corp. BTO-T were killed in Mali on Thursday after a bus transporting workers from the company’s Fekola mine was attacked 75 kilometres west of the capital, Bamako. Several other employees were injured and transported to hospital.
It wasn’t the first fatal attack on B2Gold employees at that location: In December, 2022, a bus transporting employees from Fekola to Bamako was the target of an armed robbery there. Two employees were killed in that incident.
After the 2022 deaths, B2Gold and the Malian government took steps to improve security on the route, including increasing surveillance by the country’s armed forces.
The bus attacked Thursday was under a gendarme escort that had Malian armed guards at both the front and rear of a convoy.
Clive Johnson, the chief executive officer of Vancouver-based B2GOLD, said in an interview that he doesn’t know who carried out the attack or whether it was an act of terrorism, but he floated the possibility that armed bandits may have been behind it.
“It’s a tragic event for the company. Our condolences are with the family of those who passed and also with the injured,” he said.
“We’re trying to get to the bottom of it. We’re working closely with the government to understand what happened and to take additional steps to ensure the safety of our people.”
The latest attack demonstrates once again the security threat that Canadian gold companies face operating in West Africa.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in recent years by Islamist insurgents and other militant groups in the Sahel, a sub-Saharan region comprising parts of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.
According to a report last month by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, violence against civilians accounts for about 35 per cent of Islamist attacks in the Sahel. Last year, there were 11,643 reported fatalities in the region, a more than threefold increase since 2020.
In 2019, 39 employees of Montreal-based gold mining company Semafo Inc. were killed in an attack by jihadis while en route to a mine in Burkina Faso. That same year, an executive of Vancouver-based junior gold company Progress Minerals was found dead in Burkina Faso after being kidnapped.
Toronto-based Iamgold Corp. IMG-T suffered a series of attacks in 2021 on worker bus convoys in Burkina Faso.
Violence in Mali has increased significantly since the withdrawal of French troops from the country last year. France’s military had been there at the behest of the country since 2013. Mali is a former French colony.
Russia’s Wagner Group also has a significant presence in Mali and has been linked to scores of civilian massacres in the country. Last summer, the Russian mercenary group attempted a mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin died shortly after the failed insurgence.
The attack on B2Gold had no impact on operations at Fekola, which sits about 300 kilometres northeast of the site where the bus was targeted. Fekoka is by far the company’s biggest mine. Three thousand people work at the site, and 98 per cent are Malian.
Shares in B2Gold fell by 1.2 per cent to close at $3.38 apiece on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Friday.
With a report by Geoffrey York
Niall McGee