Police on Thursday continued to maintain a wide cordon around the closed mine as they hunted for miners as they emerged.

Athlenda Mathe, the national police spokeswoman, said: “We have a decomposed body that was recovered this afternoon. The circumstances surrounding the death of this illegal miner are under investigation.”

The body is the first to be retrieved from the mine, she said.

The government has been cracking down on the miners, who are locally known as Zama Zamas, which roughly translates to those who take a chance, or those who try.

Many are migrants from neighboring countries who, unable to find legal work, enter abandoned mines to try to extract the minerals that remain.

Any gold they find is smuggled out of the country in a practice said to result in huge revenue losses for the government and the mining sector.

Their camps are often blamed for local crime, including murder, robbery and rape.

There have also been turf wars between rival outfits, often backed by powerful organized crime networks.

Mathe said authorities wanted the miners to leave and would not enter the shaft because of dangerous gases and information that the miners had weapons.

“No one is trapped”

“We’re told by intelligence that they refuse to show up again. No one is trapped.” It was unclear how long the miners had been underground, she says.

Promises to deal with the Zama Zamas have become a mainstay of campaigns by anti-immigration politicians in South Africa.