Police said 78 bodies were retrieved in a court-ordered rescue operation, with 246 survivors also pulled out from deep underground since the operation began on Monday.

The death toll in a monthslong standoff between police and miners trapped while working illegally in an abandoned gold mine in South Africa has risen to at least 87, police said Thursday. Authorities faced growing anger and a possible investigation over their initial refusal to help the miners and instead “smoke them out" by cutting off their food supplies.

Rescuers continued retrieving bodies Wednesday from an abandoned South African gold mine with hundreds more still believed to be underground, many of them dead and others too weak to come out on their own.

South African authorities have ome under intense scrutiny for their response after civic groups said hundreds of miners have been trapped deep in an abandoned gold mine for months

South African rescuers have pulled out 36 dead bodies and 82 survivors from a gold mine deep underground in two days of operations, police said on Tuesday, adding that the survivors would all face illegal mining and immigration charges.

At least 78 people have died after authorities imposed a blockade on an illegal gold mine here, part of a monthslong standoff between prospectors and a government determined to force them to surface—often by cutting off their food and water.

An operation to rescue the miners from the Buffelsfontein mine, 160km west of Johannesburg, began on Monday after a judge ordered authorities to act on humanitarian grounds. Harrowing accounts have emerged of their ordeal,