Atico Mining Begins Drilling Program at El Roble Project

Atico Mining declared that the Colombia-based 8,361 ha El Roble property is now being drilled, following recent initiation.

The initial program includes 16 underground diamond drill holes with overall stretch up to 2,000 m. The holes are part of ‘nearfield’ mine-vicinity campaign that helps investigate further, massive high-grade sulfide bodies beneath or lateral to the current mine operations. The continuity of mineralization lower than the 2,000 level will be tested by Atico's first drill holes.

The preferred targets for drilling will be based on thorough underground geological mapping, earlier Kennecott, Nittetsu and Minera El Roble S.A drill holes, and geophysics inside the mining area with IP/Resisitivity data.

The underground program is expected to serve as the first part of a massive drilling campaign that can enable increase in resources within the mining area and to find out the occurrence of further volcanogenic massive sulfide (VMS) extending through 10 km prospective trend on the property.

El Roble Project’s district-scale exploration campaign is capable of exploring additional VMS, both adjacent to the existing mining operations and not beyond the 10 km prospective trend on the property. With intent to discover additional high-grade VMS lenses, Canada-based Geotech has been retained and is ready to initiate a 500-line km helicopter-borne Versatile Time Domain Electromagnetic (VTEM) survey over the 10 km preferred contact during early June. As Time domain EM has demonstrated its efficiency in detecting massive sulphide mineralization at 200 m depths, VTEM is expected to help outline drill targets. Surface drilling of over 7,500 m for testing EM anomalies will commence in Q3 of 2012.

El Roble property features underground copper and gold mine operation with about 360 t per day nominal capacity. The property includes copper and gold mineralization in volcanogenic massive sulfide lenses. Using VMS mineralization occurrence indicators, El Roble property has been found to outline a productive contact with a covering package of host rocks stretching for a distance of 10 km.

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