Health Authorities in the North West province say 80 bodies were processed and the results will be handed over to the police.

Seventy-eight bodies were retrieved from the mine three weeks ago, while two miners died later in hospital.

A total of 246 survivors, some of them emaciated and disorientated, have been brought to the surface and immediately arrested for illegal mining and immigration since a court-ordered rescue operation began.

The South African Federation of Trade Unions accused the state of allowing miners "to starve to death in the depths of the earth".

"These miners, many of them undocumented and desperate workers from Mozambique and other Southern African countries, were left to die in one of the most horrific displays of state wilful negligence in recent history," it said in a statement.

Police said 1,576 miners had got out by their own means between August and the start of the rescue operation. All were arrested and 121 of them have already been deported, they said.

Illegal mining is common in parts of gold-rich SA. Typically, undocumented miners known as zama zamas - from an isiZulu expression for "taking a chance" - move into mines abandoned by commercial miners and seek to extract whatever is left. Some are under the control of violent criminal gangs.

Most of the miners at Stilfontein were from Mozambique, though some also came from Zimbabwe and Lesotho. Only 21 of them were South Africans, police said.

As the death toll has mounted, so has criticism of the authorities, though the government has defended the siege as part of a necessary crackdown on illegal mining.

--ChannelAfrica-