Altus Strategies discovers copper at Ethiopian asset

Natural resources group Altus Strategies has discovered hard rock artisanal copper workings at its Tigray-Afar copper-silver-gold project in northern Ethiopia.

Groups of as many as 50 miners have been excavating copper oxide mineralisation from the site after mapping and prospecting throughout Altus' third quarter identified two areas of newly developed artisanal copper workings at its Asagara prospect.

Secondary sulphide minerals had also been identified at Asagara, with rock chip samples collected by Altus returning grades of as much as 5.58% Cu.

Altus, which floated on AIM in August with a £1.11m fundraising, also noted that geological mapping had identified semi-continuous oxide copper mineralisation over a strike length of 2km with widths of up to 20m, and a parallel zone of 600m long and 15m wide.

No trenching was undertaken as part of this programme due to "extensive soil cover", with the next stage of work set to extend the current channel samples through trenching to determine the true width of the mineralisation.

Also updating on work at its Agamat gold prospect, Altus said rock chip samples from previous shearing work returned grades of 13.5 grams of gold per tonne (g/t), 9.5g/t and 7.7g/t.

"The next stage of work by the Company will be to extend the mapped shear zones, with the aim of undertaking a systematic channel sampling programme," the company said.

As of 0840 GMT, shares were up 3% to 8.25p, still below their IPO price of 10p.