Ghana gold rush sours

In October, a 16-year-old Chinese national Chen Long was killed and 101 Chinese miners detained during a two-day joint operation by Ghanaian police and immigration officials. They were investigating illegal gold mining by foreigners in the town of Manso, 60 km from Kumasi, the country's second-largest city. A few days later, the detainees were released.

Forty-one Chinese gold miners had already been detained in August and by the end of September 38 of them had been repatriated.

According to a conservative estimate, tens of thousands of Chinese gold miners have flooded into Ghana, the second-largest gold mining country in West Africa, since 2009. More than 90 percent of them came from Shanglin county in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. The first group, numbering fewer than 10, arrived in June 2006.