A contract worker has died from head injuries after being struck by a falling tree at diversified miner Sherritt International’s Ambatovy joint-venture project, in Madagascar.

TSX-listed Sherritt reported that an employee of a tree-clearing contractor was working on Thursday in a future mining area, when he was struck by a falling tree and sustained a head injury. Despite receiving immediate medical treatment, his condition deteriorated overnight, and he died in hodpital earlier on Friday.

Expressing condolences to the worker’s family, Sherritt’s president and CEO David Pathe said that a full investigation was in progress, affirming the company’s commitmrnt to determining the root causes of the incident in order to prevent it from happening again.

“Tree-clearing operations have been suspended at the operation while mitigation actions are implemented to ensure continued safe operations. Sherritt is committed to reviewing and reinforcing safety procedures and safety of all personnel is always the top priority,” he said.

Ambatovy, was busy ramping up to the 90% of design capacity level for 90 days – the threshold for declaring commercial production Ambatovy is a vertically integrated nickel and cobalt mining, processing, refining and marketing JV between subsidiaries of Sherritt (40%), Sumitomo (27.5%), Korea Resources (27.5%) and SNC-Lavalin (5%). Sherritt was the operator of the facilities.

• [Editor:Juan]