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RAPAPORT... Mustang Resources Ltd. recovered 16 gem-quality rough diamonds from a pit sampling program at its Save River diamond project in Mozambique, downstream from Zimbabwe's Marange diamond fields. The program, which began on March 23, led the exploration company to believe that diamonds may have, over time, traveled from neighboring Zimbabwe via the Save and Runde rivers. Mustang Resources sampled five locations that were close to the production plant between March and June. Approximately 10 carats of quality diamonds were recovered from top gravels but with a presence of a calcrete layer between 2.5 meters and 4 meters thick, the company's 20 ton excavator was limited to digging 4 meters at depth and the gravel below that level and identity of the bedrock remained unknown. The company plans to scale-up operations and its equipment and it believes that a 67 ton excavator could break through the calcrete layer to expose the bedrock. In order to obtain information on the gravel stratigraphy and palaeochannel location, Mustang intends to acquire a reverse circulation drilling rig to be used to locate buried gravel targets and to determine the stratigraphy in order to characterize various gravel units, as well as to identify the bedrock. A systematic drilling and pitting program will then be carried out to estimate the volume of available gravel, as the company planned to collect and process representative gravel samples from all identified terraces to determine diamond distribution, grade and value in an attempt to estimate the diamond resource. Ian Daymond, the chairman of Mustang Resources, said, “The discovery of gem-quality diamonds in the Save River license areas is a historic event for Mustang as this discovery is the first known recovery of alluvial diamonds of marketable size and quality in Mozambique. It was an impressive achievement by the operations team to mobilize the plant and equipment to the site, given this occurred in the rainy season and in a remote area of southwestern Mozambique. This has been a truly pioneering effort and an excellent start to the project, which Mustang considers to have great potential."
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