(Reuters) -Gold miner SSR Mining said on Friday that eight of its employees have been detained amid an investigation into a landslide at its mine in Turkey and that operations there remain suspended.
SSR Mining on Wednesday suspended production at its Copler mine in eastern Turkey after the landslide, which left at least nine miners missing and sparked a more than 50% plunge in its Toronto-listed shares.
Search and rescue operations to locate the nine missing workers at the mine are continuing, the miner said in the statement.
The mine produced 56,768 ounces of gold in the third-quarter of last year, and is SSR's second-largest producing gold mine, operating since 2010. The stock slide wiped out about C$1.4 billion ($1.04 billion) from the company's market value.
The company had said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday that operations were suspended as a result of a "large slip on the heap leach pad". ($1 = 1.3484 Canadian dollars)
(Reporting by Kanjyik Ghosh; Editing by Stephen Coates and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
