Commencement of Drilling at Artvin Project, Turkey

KEFI Minerals Plc, the AIM-quoted gold and copper exploration company, is pleased to announce that it has commenced a diamond drilling programme to test for porphyry copper-gold mineralisation at the Artvin Project located in the Eastern Pontide Belt in northeastern Turkey.  The Eastern Pontide Belt is a major metallogenic province in the eastern Black Sea coastal region and is prospective for volcanic-hosted massive sulphide (VHMS) deposits, porphyry copper-gold deposits and epithermal gold-silver mineralisation. 

The drilling programme will comprise four HQ diamond drillholes at the Yanikli Prospect for  a total of approximately 1,600m, testing strong gold-base metals soil and rock chip anomalies and recently defined induced polarisation (IP) chargeability-resistivity anomalies.

The first drill hole (AYDD001) commenced on 1 November 2008 and is targeting beneath the surface intercept of a channel chip sampling programme that returned 44m at 0.5g/t gold (including 1m at 8.20g/t gold, 1m at 1.38g/t gold and 1m at 1.04g/t gold), 45m at 0.12% lead, and 36m at 0.18% zinc within quartz-sericite-pyrite altered felsic volcanics with vein-style and disseminated gold-base metals mineralisation.

The drilling programme is expected to take approximately eight to ten weeks.

KEFI Minerals’ Managing Director, Jeff Rayner, commented:

“The commencement of diamond drilling at Yanikli represents another important milestone in our continued growth as an exploration and resource development company.  This drilling programme represents the culmination of months of detailed fieldwork by KEFI personnel and is an exciting opportunity to test what could be a major copper–gold porphyry system”.

The Artvin Project is subject to a Joint Venture Agreement with Centerra Gold (KB) Inc, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Centerra Gold Inc., a Canadian-based gold mining and exploration company which is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The Artvin Project comprises 15 tenements, which cover approximately 254km2.

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