Chile Says Operator of Collapsed Mine in Northern Desert Has Fled Country

A Mexican national, who leased the Los Reyes copper mine in northern Chile where two workers were killed yesterday, fled the country, investigators confirmed.

The person, whose name wasn’t disclosed, took an injured worker to the hospital before abandoning a truck at the Copiapo airport and flying to Santiago, Lorena Soto, deputy prosecutor in the northern city of Copiapo, said in a statement e-mailed by the public prosecutor’s office.

“We’ve been able to establish that the subject left the country yesterday afternoon, heading toward Argentina,” Soto said in the statement. Prosecutors will continue investigating the accident and may bring charges of manslaughter and causing serious injury, she said.

Five miners escaped yesterday’s cave-in, which was caused by explosives. Regulators hadn’t authorized the Los Reyes mine’s operations or its use of explosives, Mining Minister Laurence Golborne said yesterday in a message on his Twitter account, which was verified by his press office.

Los Reyes is in the same region of the Atacama Desert as the San Jose copper and gold mine where last month’s rescue of 33 miners was watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

To contact the reporter on this story: Randy Woods in Santiago at rwoods13@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Joshua Goodman at jgoodman19@bloomberg.net