Botswana Diamonds completes drilling programme at Thorny River

Botswana Diamonds said on Tuesday that it has successfully completed its nine-hole drilling programme on the Thorny River property in South Africa.

The AIM-traded firm said the objective was to see if two kimberlite blows - the River and River Extension - were one contiguous orebody, thus increasing the overall resource and improving the commercial prospects of the project.

Nine percussion holes totalling 483 metres were drilled.

One hole intersected 19.1 metres of kimberlite zone, which was the biggest thickness found in all three drilling programmes to date.

Another hole intersected a thickness of 13.5m of kimberlite zone, with those two intersections coming from extending the River Blow toward the Extension Blow.

The average kimberlite zone intersection was between 1.5 and five metres.

Botswana said work had now started to create a model of the combined blows to estimate the potential resource, with plans for possible open-cast mining.

Two new additional targets had been identified close to the current area, which the company said could also be blows, thus increasing resources, and would be drilled.

“This is an excellent set of results - the two blows are, as we hoped, connected, thus increasing the resource,” said chairman John Teeling.

“The two thickest intersections close to the River Blow are particularly exciting.

“Given these results, we are now examining commercial mine alternatives.”

At 1230 BST, shares in Botswana Diamonds were up 6.05% at 1.14p.